The Hungry Ghost has come to Power. Other Asuras and demons drank at that well before, and gave form to Time before. But now is the Age of the Hungry Ghost, and she is the Flow that he drinks.
The Hungry Ghost drank a Flow. And as he drank, she became all. Her abstraction bound us all to Her. And she bound us to the body of the Ghost.
We lived in the headlands, high in the mountains where the river sprang forth from the wall of ice.
As a child, the Hungry Ghost had a small face on a small head with big juicy blue lips that turned blue when he got cold.
The Hungry Ghost was never a child. Because he was a ghost. He sprang from History, already grown.
The Hungry Ghost had a giant rotund belly with no organs in it at all, no kidneys or livers or stomachs or bile ducts. Because he was a ghost.
As a child (and the Hungry Ghost was never a child, because he was a ghost), he was always so ashamed of his tiny face and his big lips and his big rotund body and his sometimes bedwetting. No one could understand how he got so fat while everyone else was starving.
And then he found the raw river. He drank of her Flow. And he did so as a sign of Power. And he did so because he needed to, because his belly ached for raw material. He never again spoke, his lips only concerned with the drink. And so he lost his voice. Without a voice, he became ashamed again that he had too much belly and not enough face. He became obsessed with saving Face.
He never found the river, he had always drank that flow. He had already been drinking it. His umbilical chord had never been severed, and it lead to his mouth. Because he had no stomach, because he was a ghost.
As he began to drink more and more, his body began to grow, his flanks to become fertile, and those that lived there began to become rich. So many of us in the headlands simply swam downstream and made our homes on his body, where we also became unconcerned with our feet and then too concerned with our shoes.
As the Hungry Ghost continued to drink, some of us began to wonder why he did not explode beneath our feet. How he could simply swallow all that without ever filling up,. Children asked their parents where all that ever went. Parents, unsure, said that he was a Ghost.
No one of us knew for sure that the Hungry Ghost pees. No-one knows because he keeps it a secret. To save Face. Because he is ashamed that his WASTE is corrosive, poisonous, radioactive. He envelopes vast deposits of the stuff throughout the headlands in containers that he hopes are leak-proof and impervious. Why in the headlands? Because there is only the Land and the Body; there is no-where else to put it. In his shame, he can only hope that the containers stay sealed. They do not. The seepage contaminates the headwaters of the River and the WASTE begins to flow downstream.
The Hungry Ghost has begun to expect that he is drinking his own WASTE. But he must save his face. He must trust in the integrity of his containers.
The Hungry Ghost cannot sustain himself on its own WASTE. The Hunger demands only Raw materials and resources. And so he became sick. His WASTE became thick as sludge and he began to starve. And his face became shiny and slick.
And so, while many of the most naive people were still debating why his body didn’t fill up an explode, the Hungry Ghost was wasting away beneath us.
Where once there was nothing beneath our feet, there was again nothing. The void had never left us.
No-one saw it coming when the belching began. Finally at a limit of disgust, the Hungry Ghost began to choke on his own WASTE, began swallow huge dry heaves that shook our cities, while he struggled to take a few more gulps of the rank flow.
Men in suits in tall buildings began to look out of their windows listlessly, dreaming of the jelly art their bodies could paint on the sidewalk below.
And then the vomiting began. And then, with the vomiting, the breaking-apart began. There was no where for the vomit to flow, no downstream from the Hungry Ghost, and WASTE continued to pour in from the Headlands. So it pooled at his feet. It was corrosive, poison, radioactive. It ate at his feet. It broke off his toenails from his toes and then his toes from his feet and his feet from his fat little ankles. And then the Ghost could no longer support his weight and he collapsed, wretching, into the pool of vomit. His kneecaps came off of his shins and drifted away. And as the vomit ate him away, we could see that he had nothing inside at all, and then we understood where we had been living.
Our cities became islands at first, then rafts, then nothing. Many drowned. Rumor says that a few of us managed to swim back to the corrupted headlands.
And so now I am back to being I, and I am an island, floating on a sea of WASTE. The river has been dammed and she lies stagnant, as do I, far from her cooling flow, penning mindless fables.
Hey man,
great stuff, tone is mostly dead on, with just a few inconsistencies. A good trick is to read the piece to yourself backward. When there is tonal inconsistency, you can hear it if you read it aloud.
One other suggestion:
“unconcerned with food and then too concerned with sneakers.”
I like that; what do you think about:
‘unconcerned with our feet and then too concerned with sneakers (shoes?).”
April 22nd, 2008 | #
“Therefore am I constrained to speak mythologically” — Henry Miller
“Always historicize” — Frederic Jameson
The best part of Crying of Lot 49 is where she sees the tower she is standing on; and the worst part is just after, where she decides never to see it again. The rest of the book is her stumbling along her paranoiac pooptrod path. Funny part indeed when the hair spray flies around the bathroom. But what’s the point. I didn’t like that book because it reproduces what everybody does wrong.
Always ontologize. Because it’s fun, because it’s illuminating, because it makes you think, because ‘Criticism’ is just a way to re-act your feelings rather than act your insights.
Trace sightlines instead of genealogical trees. Make them up. Talk about Sonic Youth becoming Welcome without caring that different people from different places made different albums and maybe they never knew each other and maybe some of them were from the lower classes and maybe some of them had overbearing parents. History is not truth, not that insight is either, but at least insight can connect us to what is unknown in the past, whereas history only to serves to make things understandable, leading us then down those easy roads of cynicism and existential reason…
Patrick Bateman is Quentin Compson on a different day. And today people kill strangers in malls. That’s an insight.
Jed, I would say that this piece ontologizes a little too far, to the point of abstractness. I don’t understand what the Hungry Ghost is; this has always been my problem with Pynchon (can’t tell whether you’re using his term here or just his Style). P. mocks ontology, so far as I’m concerned (because I don’t understand any of his images, or when I do, I forget that I did because once I get to the next one I don’t understand it and forget the first). I see no point in reproducing the ambivalence of the symbolic order as such, if this is the point. People should be ennobled by art, not made complacent in their weaker and more reactive traits.
When I say ontology I mean Heidegger. How Heidegger gives a name to everything. And how he makes these names part of a system that seeks to explain the reality he, an artist, is seeing. Modernism connects the bits into a whole. To the Lighthouse. (Being and Time, 1926; The Sound and the Fury, 1928; To the Lighthouse, somewhere thereabout.) Postmodernism scatters the bits. Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow. But why scatter seeds over a vast field all at once, why not sculpt a bonsai? Or is it that those seeds feed more, and one’s bonsai pleases an intimate crowd? Is that fascism?
I want your piece to come down somewhere. To land on solid ground. Images must connect closely enough to reality, or they must have one that grounds them. Roger Rabbit is a good example of this. So, for instance, is Mr. T. Honesty is the acknowledgment of one’s times while one goes about one’s business saying what one is trying to say. More than acknowledgment. Acknowledgment to oneself: humility in the face of one’s temporality, but earnestness still to say a thing that might transpire. Cross-breath. “From it [the machine], to me [the artist], to you [the individual], please” (Welcome). Why is it that Dylan appears to be at once the embodiment of a time and its surpassing into immortality? Does Pynchon surpass or reproduce, re-act? And does this question mean anything in face of the fact that he has clearly inspired you, made you more, more willing, more intensive than you otherwise may have been? I am beginning to see that there are different, er, well as they say strokes, stokes that is, stokes or strokes one or the other, not sure I think, it’s all this Public Image Limited I’m listening to at the moment, really quite a spaz you know, really quite unfixed, but yes, different strokes for different, well, folks I believe it was.
April 22nd, 2008 | #
The Hungry Ghost is the body of capital.
Let’s see. I hope I didn’t come across in Pynchon’s style, because that was not my intent. JP is very right, I need to focus the tone of this piece, and make it consistent. I need this piece to be consistent. This is one thing that Pynchon never is–I am resisting his style here, and need to make this more intentional. in this piece alone, I want absolute tonal and thematic unity and coherence, for the only reason that it is Other than the rest of my writing/the subject at hand in this piece. I use WASTE because I want to liberate the concept and the design from the text of The Crying of Lot 49: I don’t want my tattoo to be a reference to that book, but rather I want WASTE to reference genuine underground communication, the enactment of an anticapitalist system within the very networks and flows of capitalism. Oedipa Maas cannot participate in the WASTE network, but that does not mean that it is not there. Oedipa Maas is a product: just look at her name; she could never live on that Tower.
And here we are finally at a point where we can begin to understand how we differ. I am handicapped by not being entirely clear on Hiedigger.
You know that I passionately believe in the power of dissolution, of fragmentation to produce a quiet antikapitalist change in the communal conciousness. The very point of my thesis was that Pynchon achieves this, exactly through dissolution, through massive and uncontrollable disjunctions in the flow of the Real. This is why I think GR is the potentially most powerful novel of our age: because it ennobles people to be multiple, rather than acquiesce to the paranoiac whole. I think that you are one of the few readers of Pynchon that sees him as “reproducing the symbolic order;” most people are initially disoriented and disturbed by his prose. If they bother to work through that disorientation, they begin to find passages with direct political relevance–real revolutionary sentiment–its just that those passages re not arranged in a manifesto.
And yes, your bonsai is fascist; it absolutely resists the regime we inhabit; the regime of kaptialism. Your bonsai tries to swim upstream against the Flow of capital, to re-unify everything into the headwaters/headlands. Which is simply impossible. The power of WASTE, the power of disjunction, of which I am talking, is that it continues to flow downstream, it flows along the same flow as Kapital, and yet it destroys the Body of Capitalism. That underlying unity of modernism is a resistance, in my mind, and therefore doomed to failure.
I got that Lyotard book and am working on it. So far, I find it incomprehensible–perhaps I have been away from Theory for too long.
April 23rd, 2008 | #
edited 4/23. More work on it to go, but I changed some stuff. Loved your suggestion, JP
April 23rd, 2008 | #
Never mind Heidegger.
Did what I wrote about insight make sense to you? That is the main point about modernism; ontology too. Modernism follows an insight; ontology follows an insight. Ok I need to be more clear. An insight is a seeing that finds a tradition, finds a thought, finds a series of thougths. Insightful art is art that intends to follow a ‘thought,’ a ‘tradition of thought,’ a ’series of thoughts,’ into its full expression.
That did not say what was meant (language is a betrayal – of whom.) When I say Pynchon reproduces the symbolic order, I say this because he is reproducing the schizophrenia of the Symbolic that we, some of us, probably not all, maybe just the middle class, are experiencing under capitalism. But what is the split.
We have two elements, at least so far as minds go – meaning bodies and feelings and emotions might have their own schemata – we have two elements: active intellect and passive intellect. Passive intellect is that part of us that reacts. Consciousness is largely the effect of passive intellect. Passive intellect is that part of the mind, that principle of our experience, which forms habits, structures, recurrent passages of understanding; ego. (Ego in the early Freudian sense of a reservoir that captures energy and causes it to circulate within enclosure). Passive intellect: reactive forces, and the ego that appropriates, repeats an injunction, forges its cave of dogma, dogminates.
Passive intellect is the seat of ideology in the individual. Passive intellect says ‘I am only what comes into me and how I react.’ Passive intellect is formulated, scripted, and it is also relatively rigid. Rigid in comparison with active intellect, which is the seat of our capacity for creation. Creation is evaluation. Creation only takes place when something says ‘There is a thing which must be created.’ That ‘there is a thing’ is an evaluation. Insight is the effect of an evaluation. Evaluation and creation are the undertaking of active intellect. Active intellect is the unconscious unbound, unchannelled, undirected, unpostponed, unrestricted, uncapitalized. Un. There is a part of us which is capitalized, and there are parts that act under the oversight of a watch-lord. Oversight is structuring reality into stories, it is the repression of the aspects of stories which One would rather wish not to see. ‘One’ is the phantasm of ideology in the individual. One can be a father, it can be a friend, it can be a mother. (That’s why there’s mama’s boys.) It is no one in particular, it is the They as Heidegger says, but never mind him, the One is in this paragraph from ‘The Good Soldier’ by Ford Madox Ford:
“I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair? a long, sad affair? one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.”
The narrator accepts the council of One, and resigns himself to his story. This is the triumph of reactive forces. Active forces would say there is no story, no real stories; active forces make insight into the Real.
This is all so much bullshit, and really I’d just like to get along. I’m arguing ideas more than criticizing your piece. Trying to be active rather than reactive, to use my own goddam words.
Active and reactive, active intellect and positive intellect. The third part of this is difficult. I don’t know really what it is. Deleuze thinks it’s the will to power, as Nietzsche calls it. The idea is that there’s this other thing that either affirms or negates. There are the reactive forces, taking things in and circulating them, building up from them, so many extrapolations and inferences. There are the active forces engendering art, giving us dreams, overruling our reason- and, I suppose, bringing out laughter. Then there’s something alongside engaging in a situation of complementary efficacy, something that can affirm or negate. We feel this thing in our moods I think; a good mood is being-effected by an affirmative (will to) power. A bad mood is being-effected by a negative suchandsuch. Active forces are tied to this power of affirming; the two sides of the equation ‘active – affirmative’ are complementary. Reactive forces are tied to the power of negating. That’s why cynicism is the triumph of capitalization. One is convinced that things just are as they are.
Thesis: Modernism was an effort in active forces and affirmation. Bonsais are too. And these have their value. They impact heads. This was the point I closed on last time, out-evaluating my own point. I was speaking so negatively about everything, and then the affirmative element, will to power or whatever, forced me to past the reactive negation. So I said in stutter ‘different strokes for different folks,’ as an affirmation of your art and mine. Active forces triumph over reactive forces when we metonymize the One, switch it over, scramble it, confuse it, refuse to follow a track to its conclusion, because then it is a story, and all stories are negative insofar as they teach us to make our own lives a story. Active forces are somehow more authentic, one might say, but never mind that one. Old Martin can’t wag his finger anymore.
April 23rd, 2008 | #
Never mind Heidegger.
Did what I wrote about insight make sense to you? That is the main point about modernism; ontology too. Modernism follows an insight; ontology follows an insight. Ok I need to be more clear. An insight is a seeing that finds a tradition, finds a thought, finds a series of thougths. Insightful art is art that intends to follow a ‘thought,’ a ‘tradition of thought,’ a ’series of thoughts,’ into its full expression.
That did not say what was meant (language is a betrayal – of whom.) When I say Pynchon reproduces the symbolic order, I say this because he is reproducing the schizophrenia of the Symbolic that we, some of us, probably not all, maybe just the middle class, are experiencing under capitalism. But what is the split.
We have two elements, at least so far as minds go – meaning bodies and feelings and emotions might have their own schemata – we have two elements: active intellect and passive intellect. Passive intellect is that part of us that reacts. Consciousness is largely the effect of passive intellect. Passive intellect is that part of the mind, that principle of our experience, which forms habits, structures, recurrent passages of understanding; ego. (Ego in the early Freudian sense of a reservoir that captures energy and causes it to circulate within enclosure). Passive intellect: reactive forces, and the ego that appropriates, repeats an injunction, forges its cave of dogma, dogminates.
Passive intellect is the seat of ideology in the individual. Passive intellect says ‘I am only what comes into me and how I react.’ Passive intellect is formulated, scripted, and it is also relatively rigid. Rigid in comparison with active intellect, which is the seat of our capacity for creation. Creation is evaluation. Creation only takes place when something says ‘There is a thing which must be created.’ That ‘there is a thing’ is an evaluation. Insight is the effect of an evaluation. Evaluation and creation are the undertaking of active intellect. Active intellect is the unconscious unbound, unchannelled, undirected, unpostponed, unrestricted, uncapitalized. Un. There is a part of us which is capitalized, and there are parts that act under the oversight of a watch-lord. Oversight is structuring reality into stories, it is the repression of the aspects of stories which One would rather wish not to see. ‘One’ is the phantasm of ideology in the individual. One can be a father, it can be a friend, it can be a mother. (That’s why there’s mama’s boys.) It is no one in particular, it is the They as Heidegger says, but never mind him, the One is in this paragraph from ‘The Good Soldier’ by Ford Madox Ford:
“I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of hte wind and amidst the noises of the distant
sea, the story as it comes. And, when one discusses an affair- a long, sad affair- one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in a way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.”
The narrator accepts the council of One, and resigns himself to his story. This is the triumph of reactive forces. Active forces would say there is no story, no real stories; active forces make insight into the Real.
This is all so much bullshit, and really I’d just like to get along. I’m arguing ideas more than criticizing your piece. Trying to be active rather than reactive, to use my own goddam words.
Active and reactive, active intellect and positive intellect. The third part of this is difficult. I don’t know really what it is. Deleuze thinks it’s the will to power, as Nietzsche calls it. The idea is that there’s this other thing that either affirms or negates. There are the reactive forces, taking things in and circulating them, building up from them, so many extrapolations and inferences. There are the active forces engendering art, giving us dreams, overruling our reason- and, I suppose, bringing out laughter. Then there’s something alongside engaging in a situation of complementary efficacy, something that can affirm or negate. We feel this thing in our moods I think; a good mood is being-effected by an affirmative (will to) power. A bad mood is being-effected by a negative suchandsuch. Active forces are tied to this power of affirming; the two sides of the equation ‘active – affirmative’ are complementary. Reactive forces are tied to the power of negating. That’s why cynicism is the triumph of capitalization. One is convinced that things just are as they are.
Thesis: Modernism was an effort in active forces and affirmation. Bonsais are too. And these have their value. They impact heads. This was the point I closed on last time, out-evaluating my own point. I was speaking so negatively about everything, and then the affirmative element, will to power or whatever, forced me to past the reactive negation. So I said in stutter ‘different strokes for different folks,’ as an affirmation of your art and mine. Active forces triumph over reactive forces when we metonymize the One, switch it over, scramble it, confuse it, refuse to follow a track to its conclusion, because then it is a story, and all stories are negative insofar as they teach us to make our own lives a story. Active forces are somehow more authentic, one might say, but never mind that one. Old Martin can’t wag his finger anymore.
April 23rd, 2008 | #
I think this proves us both right perfectly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFBKV0zVXSE
April 23rd, 2008 | #
Thanks for doing all this writing for me. You know that your thoughts are vital to my entire writing life. Also, I’ve realized that, characteristically, we’re not disagreeing, but agreeing in the negative. But let’s milk this fantastic debate for all it’s worth, I need it in my life. For example:
When you say that Pynchon reproduces the symbolic order, and when I say that he follows the flow of capital rather than resisting it, we are saying the same thing. And then, of course, Pynchon is self concious about it: his books are about the process of reproducing (symbolic order/schizophrenia of capital). But the nature of schizophrenia is disjunction. So Pynchon turns the immense destructive power of schizophrenic capitalist representation upon itself, liberating us from its regime. Pynchon’s texts are only one example of WASTE within the culture stream. To go back to the fable: the WASTE is a product of the body of the ghost (the body of capital), and it flows along the same stream as capitalist (desiring) production. This idea is central to my project, both in this piece, to my thesis, and indeed in all my writing, so if it doesn’t make sense yet, I really need to find a more clear way of explaining it. The Fable was an attempt to explain it in narrative.
So, yes, then, I suppose that WASTE and Pynchon and the Fable itself are passive. Now I understand what you mean by that. But, to be honest, that dualism doesn’t do much for me–perhaps because I fall on the side of it with negative connotations.
“passive is the seat of ideology”–isn’t the point of ideology that we can never be outside it? Therefore, oughtn’t we 1) self-conciously submit to it, then 2) reclaim it through our own cultural productions. The more we submit to the Flow, the greater opportunity we will have to boss that shit, if you know what I mean. Here, I think of D & G’s “miraculating machine” from the first chapter of A-O.
That Ford Maddox Ford quote misses it because he is submitting to the One voice of the narrator, not the Multiple voice of the culture. So he is creating a false unity of storytelling, just like I am doing in the Fable (occupying one narrative voice re-produces the false ideology of a contained ego: and I like that early freud definition in that it highlights the fundamental flaw of freud: that energy can never be contained or enclosed in one distinct envelope–there will always be seepage, leakage, WASTE)
That cheezy but amazing Leonard Cohen video shows absolute and absurd passivity: as he sings of revolution, he is clearly only thinking that he needs to take a shit.
None of this is to discount the Power of active art, which is really undeniable. It’s just not what I’m after in this phase of my consciousness. And this is why: active art will always create a singularity–a rock in the middle of the Flow, and will be stuck there, out in the middle of the current, an island of Truth, Sanity, and Bonsai, alone and ignored by the passing waters. It will never divert that Flow, will never create massive, revolutionary change in the Structure of the Flow.
And that Flow is the Will to Power, and right now, the Will to Power is the Will to Capital, which is the Will to Raw Materials, which is the Will to Manufacture, which is the Will to Consume, which is the Will to WASTE
April 24th, 2008 | #
You may have already seen this. After all, it was written up in, eaten up by the news, as they say. After re-reading your post, Jedidiah, I realized that this video cum song cross-drifts your writing. The version I’ve linked is the two dimensional copy. The original was shot in stereoscopic, and is in some gallery in new york now.
Jonah and the Whale. Swallowing up (and spitting back out).
I also strongly suggest watching the other videos these guys have put together:
http://www.encyclopediapictura.com
(continue to the website)
Especially in relation to the debate here, but also simply for their aesthetic merits.
April 24th, 2008 | #