There are hooks from me to every object in this room. Hooks attached to my eyes, hooks protruding up my nostrils into my brain. Supposing I took a bottle, smashed it on the floor, kicked the shards into every corner, spread them around the floor - the cut from these hooks would still be deeper, even if I walked around barefoot.
“He might have sunk into mental chaos; instead, he triumphed through discipline, work and meditation.” Words written in the book about Van Gogh. Who was he? That he that might have but instead triumphed? That is, who almost sunk but was saved by discipline? Which one was that?
Or this one, this book by Dogen under my sheets. I had been reading it last night. It’s quite different, you see. With your little hooks a-moment, you see. He says this. “The multiplicity of one flower is five petals, the opening of five petals is one flower.” That’s good, I thought. The multiplicity of one is five, the opening of five is one. Becoming is what happens, quantity is what is. But there’s something missing in all that. A bit more about the one and that five. It got captured by ol’ Jimmy pretty well, you know the man, the one who sang about his friend, the end: “Five to one, baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive now; you get yours, baby, I’ll get mine, gonna make it baby if we try.”
Hooks in the eye, hooks in the brain, hooks in the sea of blood, L’america
May 2nd, 2008 | #
Where the existentialist is right: in claiming the outright impeccability of habit. But what do we do about it? What do we do about our habits?
‘Resoluteness’ is a choosing to be active.
But can one be resolute? Can one choose to act?
Does this not privilege the reactive,
the choosing itself,
over the active,
which needs no time to choose?
What existential reasons hide over
The triumph of reactive forces
Existentialism itself this triumph,
this age of reflection;
resoluteness is abandoning
to the subject
because the subject chooses
saying ‘I, the Subject am Zero,
I will the n+1.’
This the purpose of a phrase
like body without organs
or ‘great ephemeral skin’ -
to go beyond subject,
to seek affirmation
of a more multiplied strain
Rather than just affirm the emptiness and eternal deferment of subjectivity, +1s on a void, supplements on a zero, this thought seeks its confidence in shitting, in walking and paining, in shin splints. Affirmation of shin splints: what could the existential reasoner have to do with that, concerned as he is with his ’suffering’? This is about a free-ing up of those who are too reactive, those too excessively subjected, those too supplementalitied. What supplement, what deferment (these are Derridean ideas) is there in the jouissance of faeces passing along the winking sphincters that pass the brown waste ball through the rectum to a splash, ah,
the release of energy
and the calm
sigh of gratification.
And one can also see how Derrida’s affirmation is only an affirmed subject by noticing how closely Derridean thought has followed the liberal value schemes of abjected groups. The ‘queer’ wants to form a solid identity for the other queers. But does not the bummer also shit? Is his pleasure on the bowl any different from mine.. are his shits… queer? And is not this affirmation lacking from all political endeavor that seeks too ambitiously to solidify ’subjects’ for the subjectively abjected? Why not use the opportunity to conceive a different part for the machine (for we desire parts, we don’t deny this, we don’t seek nirvana, the extinction of parts; and foolish more we find it, existential reasoner, to resign to the part we’ve been stuck with so far, this self, ourself, this self we manage to drive into every body just a few years into its shitting, shin splinting adventure)– why not an abject instead of a subject? An abject instead of an object. An aaabject (Boston accent), that’s what you want to be man, for solidarity with your peers and poops; you can even enjoy watching sports again, free of guilt…
May 6th, 2008 | #
Well, The Times knows The Answers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04unbox.html?em&ex=1210305600&en=d23a1bdc535843e5&ei=5087%0A
May 7th, 2008 | #
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/04/03/earliest-americans-feces.html
May 8th, 2008 | #