Not very much natural light in here. But that’s just as it is sometimes. Doesn’t make for much incentive. Not much at all. Turn on a lamp.

I do not like it much. Insentient glow. But the light beams labor, want to rise, despite all annointments, blankets, pleasantries, nightstands, mirrors, rags, bathrooms, closets, beds, beds, beds

I lie back down. It is the only thing to do right now. I am still tired, and there is no where to go. My eyes close.

* * *

Later I run through the straats and towering brick huts one after another lining the streets straddle the canal, a city ring dividing the campus and gathering the old town into a half circle tract, split by the oudegracht, the old canal, a tract filled with immense brick huts and iron railings and marketplaces filled by Sunday walkers and down by the canal on the level below the streets wooden doors protect the threshold to underground lairs where the trolls and lepers live in slumberous peace….

* * *

The goddam housekeeper came in, woke me up. Only responding to his own voice. Nothing to be done, I move my legs to stretch.

The wine is splashing between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things that commence to gush out of me now pell-mell (Henry Miller)

I walked out and onto the street slowly. Looked in through the windows. My reflection looked back amidst the passing scene, tree trunks, iron rail, bicycles, lamp posts all in place, one after the other. Could use a haircut. Run my hands through my hair.

Stop in front of the window then to check myself. Was properly attired. Were shoes on straight, was belt polished. Many things to attend. To give one’s attention to.

But fair ’tis, I am as I am, things won’t change overnight, an eye for an eye in this world, a goddam surety ’tis. Insensitive to the light ’tis. Like Yoda ’tis. That’s what it’s like, feckin Yoda ’tis. Goddam irish. Can’t trust a one of em. Take a’self all the way to goddam holland to escape and you only got a dump of pitchfork tongues circling their two wheels around the silent brickway

But I was in the mirror. Jacket, set, collar extended, set, gristled, yes, but only around the mouth. Gaunt, but not unsightly, I walk to and fro thinking to myself It will do, and my hand scratches the side of my head. A window catches my eye. Flyer on it. Did someone tape that there or is it inside. What a strange thing to put up. I read the words and over the canal the sound of an engine sputtering by goes. As long as you have egos you do not belong with us. What a strange thing to write. And on the side of a building by a canal. The engine sputters away.

* * *

After I was home, it became dark, and the angel of god knows what began to spout off at me.  One another, it was to be understood, is a code implicit in great bounties of manumission. In the bite the itch was fervent.  Then silence.  But this sentence meant nothing to me!  The words, useless!  Even the explanation held no sign of reason.  Utterly useless to be given an answer with gobbledygook for argument. Goddam hypocrites. All of them making an argument for, all of them flushing for this or that cause. What is one to do about it. There isn’t a thing to be said about. Nothing to say but. It’s just as it is when. The same’s just always as. Where do you keep your. What can ya do, but go home, have a sit, cross your legs, relax, and dab a bit of butter on warm baked bread to stuff in your feckin face. Goddam hippo.

I’m posting this for a few reasons. First, to illustrate Deleuze and Guattari’s deference towards Lacan. Second, to give a clear example of the focus of their argument against psychoanalysis (second bolded section). Third, to recommence the discussion I begin in my thesis around the topics of dualism and vitalism. Two desiring-regimes (vocational and libidinal, paranoiac and schizophrenic) can be seen as underlaid by a vital substance, and yet, if we are going to allow for this notion of a One, we need to be clear about how it expresses itself individually. D&G argue against the processes by which the human individual, in fact a network (rhizome) of dissociated functionalities, comes to be understood as totalized, unified, self-willing subject. The illusion of totality leads to a vacuolization (tiny-bubble-forming) of lack in the blood of thought. Lack is impressed, one lacks with regard to totalities that exist only in the vocational logic of consciousness. To elude the impression of lack, one begins to think the self as multiple and divided. The person as a multiplicity of partial organs and desiring-machines. Intensities, units, multiples, non-signifying signs, dispersed elements of desiring-machines themselves dispersed, random drawings…. all of this in place of ‘objective representations.’ It is not that all is repudiated, or that God is dead. That is only the Eden story in the religion of lack, and it is an anthropomorphic representation of meaning. Meaning is found in the multiplicity unearthed when the body is understood as a disjunctive synthesis of organs, functions, and causes micro-political beyond imagination.

pp.307-9

Psychoanalysis makes its ambition clear: to relieve the wanting family, to replace the broken-down familial bed with the psychoanalyst’s couch, to make it so that the “analytic situation” is incestuous in its essence, so that it is its own proof or voucher, on par with Reality.

In the final analysis that is indeed what is at issue, as Octave Mannoni shows: how can belief continue after repudiation, how can we continue to be pious? We have repudiated and lost all our beliefs that proceeded by way of objective representations. The earth is dead, the desert is growing: the old father is dead, the territorial father, and the son too, the despot Oedipus. We are alone with our bad conscience and our boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing left but images that revolve within the infinite subjective representation. […] Everything, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, is taken up again as shadows projected on a stage. The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations. What a perverse operation psychoanalysis is, where this neoidealism, this rehabilitated cult of castration, this ideology of lack culminates: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! In truth, they don’t know what they are doing, nor what mechanism of repression they are fostering, for their intentions are often progressive. But no one today can enter an analyst’s consulting room without at least being aware that everything has been played out in advance: Oedipus and castration, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the great lesson of the inadequacy of being or of dispossession. Psychoanalysis as a gadget, Oedipus as a reterritorialization, a retimbering of modern man on the “rock” of castration.

The path marked out by Lacan led in a completely different direction. He is not content to turn, like the analytic squirrel, inside the wheel of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; he refuses to be caught up in the Oedipal Imaginary and the oedipalizing structure, the imaginary identity of persons and the structural unity of machines, everywhere knocking against the impasses of a molar representation that the family closes round itself. […] As partial objects the desiring-machines undergo two totalizations, one when the socius confers on them a structural unity under a symbolic signifier acting as absence and lack in an aggregate of departure, the other when the family imposes on them a personal unity with imaginary signifieds that distribute, that “vacuolize” lack in an aggregate of destination: a double abduction of the orphan machines, inasmuch as the structure applies its articulation to them, inasmuch as the parents lay their fingers on them. To trace back from images to the structure would have little significance and would not rescue us from representation, if the structure did not have a reverse side that is like the real production of desire.

This reverse side is the “real inorganization” of the molecular elements: partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since they are not partial (partiels) in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial (”partiaux“)

(Here, the translators insert a note: partiel: partial, incomplete; partial (pl. partiaux): partial, biased, as a biased judge. We have chosen to translate objets partiels throughout as “partial objects” rather than as “part-objects” (as in Melanie Klein), in anticipation of this point in the book where Deleuze and Guattari shift from Klein’s concept of the partial objects as “part of,” hence as an incomplete part of a lost unity or totality (molar), toward a concept of the partial objects as biased, evaluating intensities that know no lack and are capable of selecting organs (molecular).)

like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus, as degrees of matter); pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire that compose a signifying chain but that are not themselves signifying, and do not answer to the rules of a linguistic game of chess, but instead to the lottery drawings that sometimes cause a word to be chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes a thing or a piece of a thing, depending on one another only by the order of the random drawings, and holding together only by the absence of a link (nonlocalizable connections), having no other statutory condition than that of being dispersed elements of desiring-machines that are themselves dispersed.

At this point, a footnote refers the reader to a passage in Lacan, where he emphasizes the disorganization of the unconscious. The footnote, by D&G, goes on:

Serge Leclaire has made a profound attempt to define within this perspective the reverse side of the structure as the “pure being of desire”. In desire he sees a multiplicity of prepersonal singularities, or indifferent elements that are defined precisely by the absence of a link. But this absence of a link– and of a meaning– is positive, “it constitutes the specific force of coherence of this constellation.” Of course, meaning and link can always be re-established, if only by inserting fragments assumed to be forgotten: this is even the very function of Oedipus. But “if the analysis again discovers the link between two elements, this is a sign that they are not the ultimate, irreducible terms of the unconscious.” It will be noticed here that Leclaire uses the exact criterion of real distinction in Spinoza and Leibniz: the ultimate elements (the infinite attributes) are attributable to God, because they do not depend on one another and do not tolerate any relation of opposition or contradiction among themselves. The absence of all direct links guarantees their common participation in the divine substance. Likewise for the partial objects and the body without organs: the body without organs is substance itself, and the partial objects, the ultimate attributes or elements of substance.

(text continues)

It is this entire reverse side of the structure that Lacan discovers, with the “o” as machine, and the “O” as nonhuman sex: schizophrenizing the analytic field, instead of oedipalizing the psychotic field.

pp. 323-4 The next passage, a few pages beyond, builds on topics mentioned in this last footnote: the ‘link’ between the elements of desire, and the existence of ‘prepersonal singularities.’ This breakdown of the self is something I think we should strive to understand. These new words demand study. Where once there was thought to be a self, there may be prepersonal singularities in a state of dispersion, neighboring cells, objects within them partial to this or that cause, desiring-machines ushering to this or that production, ribosomes, mitochondria, dna, cytoplasm, golgi apparati, a nucleus, a nucleus…

Let us therefore return to the rule so clearly stated by Serge Leclaire, even if he sees this only as a fiction instead of the real-desire: the elements or parts of the desiring-machines are recognized by their mutual independence, such that nothing in the one depends or should depend on something in the other. They must not be opposed determinations of a same entity, nor the differentiations of a single being, such as the masculine and the feminine in the human sex, but different or really-distinct things, distinct “beings,” as found in the dispersion of the nonhuman sex (the clover and the bee). As long as schizoanalysis has not arrived at these disparate elements, it has not yet discovered the partial objects as the ultimate elements of the unconscious. It is in this sense that Leclaire used the term “erogenous body” not to designate a fragmented organism, but an emission of preindividual and prepersonal singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link. Such is the case in the schizoid sequences of Beckett: stones, pockets, mouth; a shoe, a pipe bowl, a small limp bundle that is undefined, a cover for a bicycle bell, half a crutch (”if one indefinitely runs up against the same set of pure singularities, one can feel confident that he has drawn near the singularity of the subject’s desire”). To be sure, one can always establish or re-establish some sort of link between these elements: organic links between organs or fragments of organs that eventually form part of the multiplicity; psychological or axiological links– the good, the bad– that finally refer to the persons or the scenes from which these elements are borrowed; structural links between the ideas or the concepts are apt to correspond to them. But it is not in this respect that the partial objects are elements of the unconscious, and we cannot even go along with the image of the partial objects that their inventor, Melanie Klein, proposes. This is because, whether organs or fragments of organs, the partial objects do not refer in the least to an organism that would function phantasmatically as a lost unity or a totality to come. Their dispersion has nothing to do with a lack, and constitutes their mode of presence in the multiplicity they form without unification or totalization. With every structure dislodged, every memory abolished, every organism set aside, every link undone, they function as raw partial objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself dispersed. In short, partial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious. That is why, when we insisted earlier on the difference between desiring-machines and all the figures of molar machines, we were fully aware that they were both contained in, and did not exist without, one another, but we had to stress the difference in regime and in the scale between these two machinic species.

In this last sentence, we see how a dualism of regimes– the individual and the socius, the molecule and the mass– is contained in the nucleus called ‘one another.’ There is something in this phrase. To ‘one’ another, to make something whole in one’s perception, to understand things as totalities: how human! The act of one’ing another: is it not humanity’s very particular expression of desiring-subjectivity? Is it not love? And then to make a ‘one’ of this very principle, to make a totality of totalization, an idea of intellect, which would love infinitely– what is that but God? We need to discover the hero no less than the fool in our discarded despots. And our essence, our functioning understood and conceptualized as a totality, if it be desiring-subjectivity, if our desire to ‘one another’ (a phrase vague enough to include both subject formation and sexual intercourse, our two means to survival) is truly our fullest aim, the most thorough expression of our deepest happiness, then desiring-subjectivity is the blood coursing through the rhizome of one’self, or better, it is the nucleus, the expressive nucleus engendering the difference of prepersonal singularities within one self.

man was the autobiographical animal

his will to power was a quest and transpiration

his love was of beauty

his life was for the species

his death lay in sex and the sublime

the god he sought

was desiring subjectivity

he knew

it all

along

Hey dudes,

I don’t know if I ever showed this to you. I showed you a kind of prequel, about two guys playing pool in Seattle, but I don’t think I ever showed you this. As I wrote maybe pretentiously in my cover letter to Black Bird Review, more than any one writer, Jean-Luc Godard had a big influence on this piece (and every piece I’ve written since I saw Masculin, Feminin).

Banality fascinates me; boredom is political.

(And Obama is our president elect. You guys: fuck yes)

Wishing everyone well. Still working on the thesis TTL, but I am reading it, and actually really enjoying it. Will comment soon.

JoPo

“Hipster,” or, “How He Could Not Go Home” 

HOUSE 

      The house is on the slope of a very steep hill, at the corner of 28^th Avenue Southwest and one of the broader streets of West Seattle, and its affect on people is that of making them jealous. Staring covetously up at the house from the skinny one-lane road at the hill’s base, those passersby prone to jealousy often curse the unseen inhabitants. Conceivably, at some point two criminals might drive by in a gray van and murmur, “That one!” One of the criminals would be tall and stupid and the other would be Joe Pesci. Though slightly smarter than the tall crook (an existential kind of gloss to his eyes) Joe Pesci would always fall prey to the ingenious and painful (though never deadly) traps lain by the young boy (McCauley Caulkin) who might conceivably be guarding the house vigilantly for his parents, who have forgotten him.

      Although, the house is more like a pioneer’s log cabin — a humble pioneer’s four-story log cabin. Its wood floors shine like Indian-head pennies, its tables have been made cleverly with elk antlers, watercolor paintings of braves on horseback dot the walls. The house is decorously furnished, well-maintained, and tasteful in certain circles. And that’s not to mention the yard, with its three terraces, jutting aquiline along the slope of the hill, with their roses and rhododendrons and their beanstalks and their tomatoes and their abortive little plum trees. In other words, the yard is very nice, too.

      Not that she is ever really home. 

CHAD AND MARC 

      “You’re mad,” Chad is saying. “You’re disappointed.”

      “Well,” says Marc with a sigh, “we could have talked about it a little.”  Chad thinks of “it” now: he turned and called to his manager that he was quitting. “Hey, Susan,” he called, almost cheerily, “I’m giving my two weeks’.” The customer, a forty-something man with a ponytail, stared at Chad, nodding: “Yes,” he whispered, “yes.” How could he possibly explain all this to Marc? He heard the words and the sound of the steam and the dead steel against his hand — it was over, he’d realized suddenly — his soul was dying.

      Chad sighs, “You don’t understand.”

      “I do understand,” says Marc, who has paid for the past four or five dates (he can’t remember), and who is a corporate lawyer whose parents in Salt Lake City don’t know that he likes boys better than girls.

      “How can you understand?” asks Chad. He has been making coffee for nearly 6,000 hours. That is, full-time for three years in a tiny nook of a vast, steel-and-concrete strip mall in South King County. He is 25 years old, wants to see Brazil.

      “I understand wanting to quit sometimes,” says Marc, who in May paid Chad’s electricity bill. Not that he minds, exactly. “You could have waited until you had another job for one thing.”

      The two are sitting on the couch of Marc’s bungalow in the Central District, which Marc has furnished politely in grays and whites and blacks. The chairs are all pearl, the couch is midnight, in the kitchen his refrigerator stands like a space-aged coffin. Here and there are little shocks of color: an enormous poster of L’Embrace on the south wall; on the plain couch an incongruously florid, hand-woven pillow from Guatemala; along the mantle two carvings from Oaxaca, an electric-green doll from South Africa, and a miniature bicycle made from bicycle spokes.

      “I’d just had enough,” says Chad, shrugging.

      Marc says, “Enough.”

      “Why are you so worried about it?”

      “I’m not worried.”

      “Is it because my lease is up next month?”

      “Yeah, that’s part of it, sure - ”

      “I wasn’t going to ask if I could stay here, so don’t worry,” says Chad, who was about to ask Marc if he wouldn’t mind, you know, Chad staying here for a little while.

      “That’s not fair,” says Marc, standing up and walking to the coffin-fridge, where he removes a beer. “You know that’s unfair. My parents will be here in three weeks.”

      “Sure,” says Chad. “Well, I wonder how I’ll pay rent at my new place? Maybe I could find a job at the firm? Would you like that?” He feels slightly drunk — mean and bold.

      “Shut up,” says Marc; his beer doesn’t taste very good.

      “I could finally meet all your friends from work.”

      “Shut the hell up, Chad.”

      “We could all of us go out for drinks,” says Chad. “You know, watch a basketball game or something.”

      Marc doesn’t answer, and instead drinks with long, steady strokes, as though painting a room’s trim. Chad gets up from off the couch and walks to the fridge, and, giving Marc a wide berth, removes a jar of pickles.

      He leaves the door slightly ajar and Marc walks slowly and silently to the fridge and closes it: “Electricity, Chad,” he says, his voice far-away. “I have to pay my bill.” It goes on for another hour or so like that. And then Chad rides his bike back to his studio where, because a Buddhist, he meditates furiously for the rest of the night. A few blocks away Marc can’t sleep, either, so he pages through the paper. Through the explosions in Palestine and Bogota and Iraq, through the weather, through the sports, through a movie review and through the comics, until he reaches the classifieds. And that’s when he finds the advertisement. 

ROBYN 

      It is a couple of days before everything gets sorted out in the right way between Marc and Chad. Marc has apologized without saying for what, exactly, meanwhile insisting that “the situation at work is incredibly complicated,” complicated in ways that Chad wouldn’t and couldn’t understand. And Chad has conceded that, yes, he doesn’t understand. They’re both sorry in different ways. But they both have a sense that they will discuss everything again, later on.

      Marc is considering this as he says, “Look at this,” handing Chad the paper with the classified he has circled: 

HOUSE-SITTER NEEDED WEST SEATTLE HOME CONTACT ROBYN 

      “It’s perfect, right?” says Marc. “No rent.”

      “Sure,” says Chad. “I guess it is.” Objectively speaking, it is perfect. It is July, his lease is up in August, now only some two weeks away. But as he stares at the advertisement Chad thinks for a single, dangerous, cruel millisecond that he hates Marc for finding this thing.

      Still he calls her, ROBYN, the following morning. Because in a sense he must.

      She has a voice like an antique record being played on an antique record-player, a voice like a life spent in basement jazz clubs. After a few attempts at friendly banter, for Chad it eventually begins to feel as though Robyn’s eyes have been sucked into the telephone and traveled through the wires to stare at him; and never one to have thrived in silence, Chad explains about the recent loss of his job.

      “I see,” she replies, her voice rising and falling like a gavel.

      Chad’s heart drops, he’s thinking vaguely of homelessness and joblessness on the streets of Beltown, hell the CD, when Robyn announces flatly that she will meet him two days from now, at noon.

      So two days later he’s sweating and balling his fists and kneading his legs when Marc drops him off (exclaiming as he drives away, “This place is beautiful!”) — it’s a little too warm and the air feels as though pulled taut. He rings the doorbell once, hears for a moment the kissing sound of feet on wood floor, and then the door swings open. Robyn is tall, her frame coated lightly with the ragged muscles that come with a lot of exercise and plenty of cigarettes. Her hair, which she wears down, is about shoulder-length and could pass for blond or white. She has the same skeletal, utterly joyless grin as Cindy McCain.

      “Hello,” she says.

      “Hi, Robyn.” She stands aside to let him in and they pass through a foyer and into a cavernous great-room. At least a dozen succulents and lilies and cacti cobweb along a pair of immense windows. When they’ve taken seats on a couple of overstuffed armchairs, Robyn sighs deeply, the light gray-green across her little nose and her sharp chin.

      “Chad, I would like to know something.”

      “Okay.”

      “Don’t lie to me, though.”

       “Okay.”

      “I would like to know if you have any experience gardening.”

      “All right.”

      “I want to warn you — I can always tell when someone is lying to me. Don’t lie because it won’t help you.”

       “Oh.”

      “So, what is your level of comfort with gardening? I would like to know.”

      Chad considers this for a moment: “On sunny days my mom used to make me and my sisters weed her garden. Also, I’ve mown lawns.”

      “I see. So — hardly any experience at all, I’d say,” she says. “Well, at least you didn’t lie.”

      “At least that.”

      “You know,” she says, “many of your responsibilities here will involve gardening.”

      “Okay.”

      “Do you want a drink?” she asks. And he realizes, yes, he does want a drink: mouth feeling as dry as dust, Chad asks for a Diet Coke in a small voice.

      “A Jack-and-Coke it is,” says Robyn, grinning, who may have misheard. She walks to the bar and adroitly makes a Jack-and-Coke and a martini. Some drunks are subtle and some drunks are just dying to be discovered, for fear of drinking alone; it is hard to know which kind is better to be. When she hands him his Jack-and-Coke, Chad spies a band of white gold on her ring finger, and it is in a certain light more porcelain-looking.

      For the next half hour, the two make something like small talk in the great-room. Everything Robyn mentions has to do with the true workings of reality, life in the abstract, the universe, things in general. Their conversation finds a curious conclusion with this statement: “I mean, if you go around asking people how they’re doing — I mean really doing — most of them are utterly miserable.” She looks intently at him, in a way that is inquisitive but doesn’t necessarily invite a response. And then she stands, her arrowhead chin tilted slightly upward, and heads for the stairs.

      A tour ensues: the rest of the house is equally cavernous; Chad has a feeling of smallness that is accentuated by the lonesome watercolor landscapes along the walls. He is lonesome. The house could be an Eddie Bauer store or the summer home of a cattle baron. There are plants everywhere, and they are flooding the confines of their pots and reaching out their mindless tendrils for light. Strangling one another. It takes nearly two hours to explain the maintenance of the building — there are plants that need varying amounts of water depending on how sunny it is outside, there are plants that must not be watered very often but must be rotated, there are plants that ought to be drowned, and there are plants that may need to be re-potted.

      “And it goes without saying,” says Robyn, “that you’ll need to vacuum and keep the kitchen tidy.” Chad only nods. “I also have a great stereo, fyi. Right now I’m listening to Gone With the Wind on tape — as read by John Voigt.” Again, Chad only nods: in this great house, it is possible to listen to Gone With the Wind as read by John Voigt on the first, second, and third floors, simultaneously.

      Before she takes him outside to explain the watering of the garden, Robyn changes into a pair of shorts and a white tank top. When they walk out to the patio and the light hits her, Chad realizes that the tank top is translucent and that her nipples stand out as dark as a pair of moths.

      “Hold on a moment,” she says. “I need something to drink.” She goes inside and Chad studies the terraced lawn and everything and the Sound slithering beneath them. He has a sense that inside — he doesn’t know how to explain it, but — she is making not one but two drinks. He feels a ticklish little pressure on his chest, a sadness, and that feeling is accompanied by the sound of a huge crash from the general direction of Robyn’s bar. When he ducks his head inside, Robyn is on her hands and knees, surrounded by shattered glass and red liquid.

      “I’m fine,” she says.

      “I know you are,” he says after a little while. “Are you okay, though?”

      “Yes.”

      “Should I grab anything?” She groans, stands up, walks to the room that serves as her office, returns with a set of keys and a stack of papers. She hands all this to Chad.

      “This explains everything,” she murmurs. “You’re hired.” 

JP 

      On the night of the 1^st of August, after he has watered Robyn’s plants carefully for some three hours, Chad meets his friend JP in a dingy basement bar. That night there is some technical glitch on the jukebox so that all you can play is the album that Bob Dylan and Emmy Lou Harris did together.

      “How’s Marc?” JP asks after a few minutes, innocently enough.

      “He’s all right.”

      “Hmm,” says JP. “Did something happen?”

      “Well, we had a kind of fight.”

      “What kind of a fight?” JP’s eyes flicker — they are the eyes of a man who hasn’t dated anybody in four years.

      “It’s a fight — I don’t know — one we’ve had a couple of times. I don’t really know how to describe it.” Chad attempts to convey a disinterest in talking about it, and maybe he succeeds because JP says:

      “Your new house is big?”

      “Hmm,” says Chad, knowing where this is going. “Four stories if you count the basement.”

      “You know, I insist on not counting the basement when describing a house. It’s just something that I do.”

      “You do what?”

      “I insist on not counting the basement when I’m talking about a house. Basements are so variable and varied. You know, it’s really not fair.”

      Chad furrows his brow: “You’ve devoted thought to this?”

      JP begins to answer but doesn’t, fixes his eyes on Chad. JP has changed a lot since they graduated together three years ago, the fissures in his mind growing in places into cracks; his thoughts, though less abstract, make less sense, somehow. JP is a man sullen at bars, under lights with an imperfectly white skull shining through close-cropped hair, a man in the transition from thin to gaunt with a $3,000 set of teeth now nightmarishly large in his head. His pants and t-shirts have grown tighter; his cigarettes are hand rolled.

      “I haven’t devoted thought to it until just now,” says JP.

      “I thought so.”

      “But I think I’m right, still,” he says. They’re quiet together, JP’s eyes scanning the bar.

      “But honestly,” JP says, “it’s a big house? A good house for a party?”

      Just as Chad suspected.

      “It would be,” says Chad. “But there won’t be any parties.”

      “No? Not a little one, amongst a few close friends?”

      “No, it’s too nice,” Chad says, adding, “The whole thing feels breakable.”

      “We can have a careful party.”

      “Like a party where the theme is ‘Be careful.’”

      “Yeah, people can wear hardhats.”

      “We could all tiptoe.”

      “Yeah, and I’ll take seizure medication, just in case I’m epileptic.”

      “I’ll wear depends,” says Chad. JP laughs, nods. And so the idea is born.

      Over the next week, Chad decides by miniscule degrees that a party should be thrown at Robyn’s house “amongst a few close friends.” It’s not that JP convinces him, exactly — it’s more like Friday rolls around and there has generally been talk of a party, “a little one, amongst a few close friends.” Which sounds innocent enough.

      Of course the party has a fatal flaw: on Friday night the close friends bring their close friends, who in turn bring theirs. A party like a mustard seed, soon it sprouts a pony keg and shrimp cocktails. Marc, who sensed danger from the get-go, and who would be a decade older than the youngest of the attendees, has declined to come. An elk-antler nightstand is tipped over accidentally, mineral water spilled on an oriental rug — these are tense, sweaty moments, people grumbling.

      Miraculously, though, there is no visible or permanent damage. It is a night for celebrating the occasional lack of disaster or distress. Everybody is having a good time and soon dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Everyone is dancing and having a good time, except, of course, JP. JP thought that people had been making fun of him in some wordless way, left at ten o’clock, and walked the nearly ten miles to 3^rd and Union.

      At 2 am Chad gets a phone call.

      “I’m at 3^rd and Union,” comes JP’s voice. “I walked.”

      “That’s great,” says Chad.

      “I felt social anxiety.”

      “You must be in good shape.”

      “I do my best,” he says. “Bon soir, monsieur.”

      “Good night.” 

CHAD, MARC, JP 

      JP’s basement flat south of downtown has cheap rent. The building has been constructed on a hazardous materials dump and you get used to the smell but the eyes smart when it rains. The three men are there.

      Chad says, “It’s honestly a bit of a relief to get away from the house.”

      Marc says, “That beautiful house, if I lived there I’d — God, I don’t know what I’d do.”

      JP says, “Sell it. Move to Mexico. Live forever. You haven’t seen the inside of this place, Marc, but it’s evil.”

      Chad thinks, He hasn’t seen the inside of the place; says, “You know, I think I probably would sell that house if I owned it. The house has some strange — I don’t know the word — energy.”

      Marc says, “Far out, man.”

      Chad frowns, “No, I’m serious. It’s not like, you know, an Indian graveyard or anything. It feels more like a strip-mall.”

       “You know,” says JP, “I can’t even wrap my mind around somebody owning a house like that in this town. It just doesn’t compute. It’s impossible.”

      Chad hasn’t wondered up until now, but now he’s quite curious: “It must be worth — I don’t know. There would be no real reason to work. To do anything,” Chad says — and the notion is lovely. They are quiet a while. JP takes off his work shirt and underneath he has on a Che Guevara shirt that he bought at an Urban Outfitters in a Denver suburb.

       “In a way she reminds me of Sarah Palin,” says Chad. He thinks of how she invited him over for lunch twice in the week before she left, and how she has called three times since her departure “to check up on things.”

      Marc says, “Who? Robyn?”

       “Jesus,” says JP, eyes flickering. “Sarah Palin. I wonder if we’ll ever get to meet her?”

       “Maybe,” says Chad. “But I doubt it. She’ll want me to leave as soon as she comes home, no doubt.” Right after he says this, Chad realizes that it is totally untrue and that he could probably stay for as long as he wanted. For all eternity.

      JP says, “We should throw her a welcome-back party.”

      Chad says, “I’m not sure that she’s the welcome-back-party type.”

       “Wow,” says JP. “What a great idea. I can make salmon.”

      Chad says, “You’re not a very good cook and we’re not throwing her a welcome-back party so you can satisfy your morbid curiosity about her.”

       “It’s not about curiosity,” says JP. “Besides, this way she’ll think of you fondly.”

       “I’m curious about Robyn, too,” says Marc, “but I’m not that curious. This is a stupid idea, JP. If it happens then I’m not coming.” He looks at Chad.

      “That’s fine,” says JP, as though things have been settled. Conversation curdles. They have drunk two bottles of wine in JP’s basement flat. It begins to rain and they hardly notice the stinging in their eyes. But around ten or so they get a little restless.

      “Let’s go meet some ladies, huh?” says JP, winks.

      At the bar they don’t meet any ladies. It’s the same bar with the same busted, Bob-Dylan-and-Emmy-Lou-Harris jukebox. JP speaks about the welcome-back party like it’s a thing they’ve already agreed upon, and the event becomes in Chad’s mind as inevitable as some ancient ritual; it will be a burnt offering. He can recognize a thing off there, in the distance, like a piece of the night itself. 

CHAD, JP, (MARC), ROBYN 

      The remainder of August passes too quickly. Chad applies for a job as a bellhop, applies for a job in a bookstore, applies for a job as a waiter, and can not explain a feeling of utter hopelessness. He tries to tell Marc about it, but Marc is “working on a big case.” Chad spends a few days riding the bus aimlessly, a few more writing a letter to a cousin he was once close to. The hours and weeks blur together, become abstraction, there’s no such thing as time. Even so, it passes.

      One day Chad wakes up in the little twin bed in Robyn’s house where he sleeps, and he just plain decides to get drunk. When he’s done so, he rides his bicycle down to the beach and drinks more at a Cuban restaurant. There is $376.48 in his savings account. By 2pm he is sleeping on the beach and it begins to rain. It starts out as warm summer drizzle, but the cowardly Puget sun ducks behind a thick bank of clouds and it becomes a cold, toothy rain. He stirs at 4 or so, shivering, with his lungs feeling like they’re congealing into something. A dull ache threads itself along his bones. He returns to Robyn’s house and collapses into his bed, quaking between the thin cotton sheets.

      A dream comes to him, as though from the thickness of the clouds themselves. In the dream it is Dia de los Muertos — JP is there, drinking Mézcal, the little street urchins are calling him el mézcalito. Marc is there in a three-piece suit, and Chad clings to him not out of love but because Mexico is fanged and nightmarish in the dream. JP’s walking with someone, too: it’s his wife. Chad sees the two coats of eye shadow and the grotesque harlequin’s smile and two nipples like a pair of moths: Robyn. The four of them are stumbling and frantic along the cobbled streets, night falls and someone screams: Marc turns to Chad out of a black void and says it, “I didn’t mean to.” He’s talking about Robyn. He’s been screwing Robyn.

      Somewhere a doorbell rings, dragging Chad from the vision: when he awakens his breath comes to him as though from a draining sink, with spit and phlegm in with the air. His head hurts him so bad it feels like the end of the world. Or else it’s just him, a tiny and insignificant part of a vast, dying world, and he’s dying in the small bed in West Seattle. His skin is wet to the touch and he is uninsured.

      And then the knowledge drops on him like fifteen pounds of dark matter: today is the day that Robyn comes home. Achingly he sits up and looks around. Half-dumbfounded and half-furious with himself, Chad takes in his clothes and duffel bags scattered over the ground, along with the books and the odd little scribbled-on pieces of paper that collect around Chad in times of depression and/or unemployment. In a far corner is his disassembled bookshelf, which he was unable to fit into the storage space he rented for the month of August.

      The doorbell rings again.

      Outside, in the dull rain now turning to mist, it is of course JP. When Chad has shuffled to the front door, he finds his friend has trimmed the blondish pseudo-goatee that clings precariously to his face. JP sports a baby-blue leisure suit and effeminate, white hushpuppies, a thick, brown roll of paper tucked under his arm. The sinister, big teeth split his lips in a smile as he hands Chad the package (“A fine cut of salmon,” he says), and enters.

      “JP — what are you doing here?” Chad asks. In a sense he already knows.

      “Robyn’s coming home today,” says JP. “Remember?” Chad sits down and hears a sickening little rattle from his chest or stomach.

      With a groan, he says, “I didn’t think you were serious about the party.”

      JP doesn’t answer, walks through the foyer and into the great room, and sits on one of Robyn’s couches. In a way that is casual but weirdly ostentatious, JP picks up his hushpuppied feet and puts them on Robyn’s coffee table, looking around as though he’s never seen the place before.

      Chad says, “I’m not sure she’s even coming home tonight.”

      JP stops his study of the room, stares blankly at him: “Jesus, you look horrible,” he says. “What’s the matter with you?”

      “I’m sick — a cold or something,” says Chad, now feeling the tonsils in the back of his throat like something that didn’t go down.

      “Huh,” says JP. “I could do something — make a cup of tea — I think I want a cup of tea.” He sets water to boil in the kitchen.

      In the bathroom, Chad rubs his throbbing limbs and hacks and spits. He presses one nostril and then the other, the sickness leaving him little by little, taking some of Chad along with it.

      “Do you think it might be allergies?” calls JP from where his water boils.

      “No, JP,” Chad says, the chill in his bones, now. “I don’t think that it’s allergies.” He goes to his room with a vague notion of getting in touch with Marc. But at the sight of his bed he can only think to ball himself up, shaking again beneath the covers. Sweat pours from him but he’s never been colder, and the thought that he might be very, very sick is almost as bad as the sickness itself. Because if he’s sick he won’t know how to leave and if he doesn’t know how to leave he’ll forever be at Robyn’s house with her and her cocktails and the Day of the Dead, Mexico, baked salmon and capers, and JP’s nightmarish and $3,000 smile. Chad remembers with perfect clarity a moment three years earlier: holding a notice from the Utility Company in one hand, with the other he scraped a thick, caterpillar-like fungus from some leftover tomato soup. He remembers the moment until sleep is on him again, this time dreamless.  

ROBYN, JP 

      And when Chad awakens it is night and there is music (ominously, Emmy Lou Harris and Bob Dylan again); somewhere sharp, feminine laughter and a raspy, nasal, sing-song voice are clawing at one another. Chad walks with heavy steps to his room’s door, opens it, and steps into the great room with a plasticine smile on his face. Yes, Chad is thinking, I’m sick. I’m very sick.

      He can not go home.

      The night will continue on the trajectory of the sight that greets him: on the dining room table there are plates and silverware and two empty bottles of wine. A half-drunk bottle of Riesling, also, is on the counter. The coffee table has been moved to a corner of the room, and JP and Robyn are dancing very close, smiling without joy or sorrow; JP’s hand is on Robyn’s collar bone and an expression on his face seems to say, “Is this it?” And so it goes: the three will make their odd hellos-and-how-do-you-dos?, Chad will become sicker, feel even more a stranger in the vast house. For the remainder of the night Marc will not answer his phone. Later on Chad will spy, as he stands totally alone on the porch, a big ship anchored in the middle of Puget Sound like an enormous, fluorescent pickle in the darkness.

Unwittingly, the practices of both the Lacanian psychoanalyst and the Zen master aim to disrupt the internal functioning of power in the subject of a ruling class. Power operates in the ruling class as an illusion. The illusion is situated in the subject as a sense of purpose, responsibility, or right. The subject draws its sense of purpose, responsibility, or right through an internal discourse with an ‘image,’ ’super-ego,’ or ‘Other.’ (This process operates differently in the conscious or the unconscious, unconscious or super-ego, depending on the person). This ideal entity, whatever we call it, and in whatever quadrant of the brain we imagine it to be situated, is an internal seat of power composed of a vast multiplicity of injunctions, repressions, prides, beliefs, and biases introjected over the course of one’s life. It is the aim of the Zen Master and Lacanian psychoanalyst to reveal the subject to the entirety of this discourse and process of introjection. The aim is to liberate the subject from the mental processes which, by keeping one in a cycle of happiness and unhappiness, consumption and lack, activity and comparison, hold one back from desiring in a revolutionary manner. This liberation is not from one’s body, but from the illusion through which life in accordance with the status quo is ensured to be consistent. It is a disruption which, rather than being violent, and rather even than being a deconstruction of that ‘Other’ which holds the subject captive, should be an enabling of subjective activity in which that Other is not needed because actual others are so close at hand. This ‘enabling’ is the reform suggested by Guattari. Here’s Lacan, near the beginning of his career (”Beyond the Reality Principle”).

But let us pursue our outline of analytic experience. The listener is thus situated in it as an interlocutor. The subject solicits him to assume this role, implicitly at first, but soon explicitly. Remaining silent nevertheless, and hiding everything including even his facial expressions (which are, moreover, barely noticed in him), the psychoanalyst patiently refuses to play this role. Is there not a threshold at which such an attitude must bring the subject’s monologue to a halt? If the subject continues, it is by virtue of the law of analytic experience; but is he still addressing the listener who is truly present or is he instead addressing some other now, someone who is imaginary but realer still: the phantom of a memory, witness of his solitude, statue of his duty, or messenger of his fate?

In his very reaction to the listener’s refusal to assume the role of interlocutor, the subject reveals the image he has replaced him with. He communicates to the analyst the outline of this image through his imploring, imprecations, insinuations, provocations, and ruses, through the fluctuations of the intention that he directs at the analyst and that the latter motionlessly but not impassively takes note of. Nevertheless, as these intentions become more explicit in his discourse, they interweave with the accounts with which the subject supports them, gives them consistency, and gives them a rest. In this discourse, he formulates what he suffers from and what he wants to overcome through his analysis, he confides his secret failures and his successful designs, he judges his own character and his relations with other people. He thus informs the analyst about the entirety of his behavior, and the analyst, who witnesses a moment of that behavior, finds in it a basis for its critique. After such a critique, this behavior shows the analyst that the very image he sees emerge from the subject’s current behavior is actually involved in all of his behavior. But the analyst’s discoveries do not stop there, for as the subject’s demands take the form of pleas, his testimony broadens through its appeals to the witness. These are pure narratives that appear “outside the subject” that the subject now throws into the stream of his discourse: unintended events and fragments that constitute his history, and, among the most disjointed, those that surface from his childhood. But we see that among these, the analyst stumbles anew upon the very image that, by playing the game as he does, he has awakened in the subject, the trace of which he found impressed upon himself by the subject. He certainly knew that this image was of human essence, since it provokes passion and oppresses, but it hid its characteristics from his gaze, like he himself does from the patient’s. He discovers these characteristics in a family portrait that includes the image of the father or of the mother, of the all-powerful adult– tender or terrible, kindly or punishing– the image of a brother, a rival sibling, a reflection of the subject himself or of one of his companions.

But the very image that the subject makes present through his behavior, and that is constantly reproduced in it, is ignored by him, in both senses of the word: he does not know that this image explains what he repeats in his behavior, whether he considers it to be his own or not; and he refuses to realize the importance of this image when he evokes the memory it represents.

Now, while the analyst completes the task of recognizing this image, the subject, through the debate that he carries on, completes the process of imposing its role on the analyst. The analyst derives the power he will have at his disposal in his action on the subject from this position.

In effect, the analyst then acts in such a way that the subject becomes aware of the unity of the image that is refracted in him into disparate effects, depending on whether he plays it out, incarnates it, or knows it. I will not describe here how the analyst proceeds in his intervention. He operates on the two registers of intellectual elucidation through interpretation and handling affect through the transference. But to establish the times at which he does so is a matter for technique, which defines them as a function of the subject’s reactions; adjusting the speed at which he does so is a matter of tact, thanks to which the analyst is informed about the rhythm of these reactions.

Let us simply say that, as the subject pursues his analysis and the lived process in which the image is reconstituted, his behavior stops mimicking the image’s suggestion, his memories reassume their real destiny, and the analyst sees his own power decline, having rendered useless by the demise of the symptoms and the completion of the personality.

Such is the phenomenological description that can be given of what happens in the series of experiences that form a psychoanalysis. Some might say that it is the work of an illusionist were the result not precisely to dispel an illusion. Its therapeutic action, on the contrary, must be essentially defined as a twofold movement through which the image, which is at first diffuse and broken, is progressively assimilated with reality, in order to be progressively dissimilated from reality, that is, restored to its proper reality. This action attests to the efficacy of this reality.

Felix Guattari offers redirection in 1973 interview titled ‘Molecular Revolution and Class Struggle’

The first task of a theory of desire must be to try to pick out ways of breaking through into the social field, rather than sanctioning the quasi-mystical practice of the private psychoanalytical encounter as it has developed after Freud. Correspondingly, any theorizing that bears on the present class struggle must be concerned primarily with how to open that struggle out to the desiring-production and creativity of the mass of the people. Marxism, in all its forms, is lacking in desire and loses its essence by tending towards bureaucratism and humanism, while Freudianism has not merely ignored the class struggle from the first, but has, further, continually falsified its early discoveries relative to unconscious desire by trying to handcuff them to the family and social norms of the prevailing order. Refusing to face these fundamental drawbacks and trying to gloss over them results in making it seem that the internal limitations of the theories are limitations that are intrinsically inseparable. There are two methods of receiving theoretical statements: the academic’s way is to take, or leave it, the text as it stands, whereas the enthusiast’s way is to take and leave it, manipulating it as he sees fit, trying to use it throw light on his circumstances and direct his life. The point is to try and make the text work.

[…] Some twelve years ago, in an effort to get somewhere with these questions, I put forward the notion of transversality to convey the capacity of an institution to rearrange the ‘introjects of the super-ego’ in such a way as to get rid of certain symptoms and inhibitions. A modification of the ‘local coefficient of transversality’ implies the existence of a source of desire, a group eros, a takeover, if only a partial one, of the individual’s organization by the group as subject. Thus a social formation can alter the unconscious ‘causality’ that stimulates the super-ego to act, and its modification of the introjects of the super-ego can result in a rearrangement of the psychic area as a whole. In this situation, the problem of internal and external repression takes on a different form. When it is backing up what takes place at school, in the family, in the army, etc., psychoanalysis is quite simply reactionary. No existential bursting open, no splitting of the self, no lack, no castration, can justify intervention of a repressive third party. It is pointless to say that it is no longer the real father, that what is really involved is a structural logic that would enable the subject to become established as desire in the signifying order, that it is vital for him to give up his undifferentiated imaginary pleasures if he is to attain to the ’symbolic’ — which is the be-all and end-all; all this paraphernalia of theory exists merely to justify the cosiness of the analytic session. Don’t worry about society! Your desire is our affair — we’ll give it free run secretly, here on the couch. And it works, one must admit. Psychoanalysis works very well, which is why it is so dangerous. It is the capitalist opium par excellence. Just to expose it is not enough; some way must be found of rendering it ineffective, unprofitable.

We need a profitable, public forum for creative expression operating as a gap in which the calling-to-power between the one (the subject) and the other (its phantom despot) itself falls silent.

While I wait sleepless for you to vote, I utter the syllable Jaya.  Victory.  Jaya Obama.

Today we will chose you to be our leader.

Be deserving of our adoration.  Fight for justice, make no compromises.  You represent me, be worthy of your responsibility.  Unlike George Bush, you will have power over me.  Because I am asking you to take it.

With this in mind,

let us utter the word

Jaya

Victory

Obama.

Dear America,

If tomorrow I awake and find out you chose wrong, then the democratic process has finally proved that it has failed us, again and again.  There will be no more working for change within the system, because there won’t be a system long.  This is not what I want, but it is what is at stake

So I posted the first section of my long story on my blog, and some pics and soonish some vids from this side.  Mostly goddess worshipping stuff.

Including this sycophantic piece:

There is no coming to be.  There is no ceasing to be.  There is only being, and not-being.  I am a being, incessant, eternal, infernal.  I am a being, with boundaries, doomed to take up space, to take up time.  Fully enabled to eat food.  Constantly lucid.  Prone to misuse.

A singularity alone.  Until I leave this world, I will be encased in skull and skin.  Incapable of Being-Another.

I am a being passing time, I, at the beginning of a long time, passing it until it begins to seem short.  I constantly crave the future, especially at the indeterminate moments when it is clear that the future is not presently occurring.

I move through geography freely.  I inhabit places discontinuous.  Everywhere is disjunction.  I can know India and I can know America without ever knowing the ocean.  Everything everywhere is the same.  I am the same everywhere.  Everywhere I am new, a being from outside, I do not know what I signify where.  I do not know what my presence tells people about themselves.  I invite myself into communities.  I find them open, as if waiting for me.  I am lead to the right places, have found right places all over dissimilar countries.

Which is being a guest.  A constant stream of needs, a constant need to inhabit as small a space as possible, as if by shrinking myself enough, that small space will become my own.

I ride the surface of things, my body and I.  Never will I see the inside, no matter where on the surface I roam.  Not in this life.  If there is enlightenment to be had, I am not ready for it.  Not in this life.  Because I like life too much.

And because I was raised in axiomatic liberal equality, I do not believe in the human capacity to transcend the human.  If I cannot, how can another?  Solitary years of tapas in the mountains  may only make you mad and malnourished.  A day spent in meditation is still a day spent, a daily event.  A thing that seeks to transcend the body is still a thing of the body.  A guru is a person in a community.

I seek eventual expansion.  I dream of an eventual global community bound by more than economy, which is fickle.  All those that I know ought to know each-other, even if only through me.  I want to be a body of connections that can traverse space.

What deadens my mind is frustratingly similar to what sets it aflame.  Ganesha cut off his Ivory Trunk to make a pen.  Must I also mutilate myself for words?  Will I give my body alongside my mind to this page?  What reward in this do I seek?  Many of those I worship did.  Because heroism, even distasteful, dirty, lewd and incomprehensible, comes from sacrifice.

In the end, I am only scorched flesh, mixing with thousands of businesslike defecations floating down the river Ganges.  Reconverted, used again in writhing flesh.  I brought nothing here with me, and I will leave empty handed, without even my own red meat.

full of floating and I run to touch the parts of it

like a river I once saw that kept on going

but the river kept on going.

nothing was dreamlike and everyone drank

chamomile tea.

somewhere a spring went off and he leapt, somewhere

a wall grew tall and I peed.

diserthesis2.pdf

Here’s the product of me year in ze old country. It’s about two D.H. Lawrence novels and some philosophy but you don’t have to have read any to make sense of it. I’d like to talk about this stuff so drop a line if you get through any of it. The best stuff’s at the end of part 3, I figure.

My main intention was to pose an alternative to theories of alienation by making up lots of terms that would serve to indicate how one might re-fuse the habits through which one’s given to holding oneself a-part.