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.
Thanks so much for posting dude. I like this a lot, though a bit thrown by the deconstruct/depress at the end. And I will continue to disagree with you about the possibility of surpassing the human. It’s a matter of Great Ego and Little Ego; Awareness vs. Consciousness. (Not that I’ve gotten anywhere towards the formers). I was reading this book yesterday that makes the fun etymological argument about the word consciousness — it means with-knowingness. It’s a knowing that is always ‘with’, a knowing that is always with the desire to be known. Consciousness demands its own recognition. Which leads to aggression and loneliness and such… consciousness so easily gives way to contra-sciousness, knowing-against. It’s similar with what Lacan says about the unconscious, that’s it’s ‘that beyond in which the desire for recognition is bound up with the recognition of desire.’ I think Awareness, in the Zen sense, is freeing oneself from the desire for recognition, with the result that the recognition of desire becomes so sublimely understood that one no longer has any unconscious nor conscious desiring — no more intentions or repressions. Seeing desire everywhere, nothing else exists. Just being and not being, like you said.
I’ve always wondered, after they get enlightened, can monks get laid?
But it’s interesting that you say no becoming… all the philosophy I like, Deleuze/Nietzsche/Bergson at least, says there’s only becoming, no being. For them liberation is seeing from the standpoint of eternity, and the only thing eternal is becoming… But it’s all a matter of what you’re trying to see I suppose. In terms of human individuals and communities, the people and groups of people we think about, engage with, help or hinder, there is only becoming. Cells die, and the individual continues to exist; it exists only as something that becomes. Citizens die, and the community still exists, new citizens are born and join; the community is only ever a becoming.
‘Body of connections traversing space’ — let’s figure out how to make that happen, how to get bodies jobs that don’t require enslaving minds. Perhaps people would pay for said connections? Perhaps we can turn this into a beautific-grotesque business monkey?
Some interesting sentences from Deleuze’s Nietzsche book regarding becoming, affirmation — these as opposed to axiomatic liberal equality:
To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives.
But affirming in its full power, affirming affirmation itself — this is beyond man’s strength.
The sense of affirmation can only emerge if these three fundamental points in Nietzsche’s philosophy are borne in mind: not the true nor the real but evaluation; not affirmation as acceptance but as creation; not man but the Over-man as a new form of life.
Affirmation is the enjoyment and play of its own difference, just as negation is the suffering and labor of the opposition that belongs to it. But what is this play of difference in affirmation? Affirmation is posited for the first time as multiplicity, becoming and chance. For multiplicity is the difference of one thing from another, becoming is difference from self and chance is difference “between all” or distributive difference.
(end Deleuze)
But then, you say you are ‘a being passing time.’ Is anything in you eternal? Perhaps your genetic makeup… but is that you? Is it rather your soul, and if so, ought or ought it not to seek escape from something along the lines of samsara?
November 4th, 2008 | #
or maybe you meant all of that ironically, or maybe you didn’t and it could be read that way and then becoming and cessation of self would be the piece’s blind spot
November 4th, 2008 | #
Yeah, I was really sloppy with my language here. When I said “no-becoming” I was trying to imply that a Being (in the sense of an Atman) could not be born nor could it die. What does your trio of thinkers mean when they say “becoming?” Changing yourself to fit a communal definition of yourself? If so, we’re talking bout two different things. Here: “Cells die, and the individual continues to exist; it exists only as something that becomes. Citizens die, and the community still exists, new citizens are born and join; the community is only ever a becoming.”. In the first sentance, I’m sure we’re talking about the same thing with opposite language: cells die, bodies die, but the energy that drives those bodies is only metamorphosed into something else (matter/energy can neither be created nor distroyed–so says Science). Communities, though, can die, of course. So I’m not sure about that second sentance.
I liked your definition of enlightenment, but it didn’t convince me that it is possible while one is within one’s own body. In essence, the idea of enlightenment is removing all desire from yourself–desire for recognition included. But while we are within bodies, we will desire: your question can monks get laid is a good example. Perhaps we can overcome our sexual desires (if it comes to it, we can cut off our testicles), but we will never be free of our need for Food. Even if we go all aescetic and shit, we’re still Lacking food. So while I will try to control my desires, I’m saying that I’m not going to try to be desireless and enlightened. Not in this lifetime.
November 6th, 2008 | #
You gotta read some Zen man — it’s anti-asceticism! The Buddhism and the Enlightenment I’m talking about is from Japan. Buddha broke from the other Indian religions because of their self-denial; Bodhidharma left India because Buddhism was becoming decadent; in China, Ch’an Buddhism mixed with the ‘do-nothing’ sentiment of Daoism; the transmission crossed the sea to Japan, Zen began, and Dogen perfected it. In Zen it’s not about overcoming or removing desire. It’s about coming full circle from a state of delusion and discontentment to awareness and reconnection with yourself, such that the distance between you and your self is null. One hand clapping. I’m gonna quote some from Shunryu Suzuki, the first Zen Master in San Fran in the 50s. His point is that we must see through our attachments, letting desire be the flow it is rather than the blocked up, reservoired, patchwork confusion it habitually becomes. It’s a matter of ‘being’ one’s effort rather than ‘making’ one’s effort or following some ‘idea’ of it:
The most important point in our practice is to have right or perfect effort. Right effort directed in the right direction is necessary. If you effort is headed in the wrong direction, especially if you are not aware of this, it is deluded effort. Our effort in our practice should be directed from achievement to non-achievement.
Usually when you do something, you want to achieve something, you attach to some result. From achievement to non-achievement means to be rid of the unnecessary and bad results of effort. If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality in it. So just to do something without any particular effort is enough. When you make some special effort to achieve something, some excessive quality, some extra element is involved in it. You should get rid of excessive things. If your practice is good, without being aware of it you will become proud of your practice. That pride is extra. What you do is good, but something more is added to it. So you should get rid of that something which is extra. This point is very, very important, but usually we are not subtle enough to realize it, and we go in the wrong direction.
Because all of us are doing the same thing, making the same mistake, we do not realize it. So without realizing it, we are making many mistakes. And we create problems among us. This kind of bad effort is called being “Dharma-ridden,” or “practice-ridden.” You are involved in some idea of practice or attainment, and you cannot get out of it. When you are involved in some dualistic idea, it means your practice is not pure. By purity we do not mean to polish something, trying to make some impure thing pure. By purity we just mean things as they are. When something is added, that is impure. When something becomes dualistic, that is not pure. If you think you will get something from practicing zazen, already you are involved in impure practice. It is all right to say there is practice, and there is enlightenment, but we should not be caught by the statement. You should not be tainted by it. When you practice zazen, just practice zazen. If enlightenment comes, it just comes. We should not attach to the attainment. The true quality of zazen is always there, even if you are not aware of it, so forget all about what you think you may have gained from it. Just do it. The quality of zazen will express itself; then you will have it.
You are living in this world as one individual, but before you take the form of a human being, you are already there, always there. We are always here. Do you understand?
I’ve cut out a paragraph and elided the end; I like it like this. The section is called ‘Right Effort,’ it’s in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Do not try to control your desires. Just be them, rather than calling them desires. Practice awareness; that’s zazen. Doesn’t matter if you do it sitting, standing, walking, talking, fucking, eating, spitting, or riding a cow smacking its ass and singing the national anthem. Just be what you are doing.
That’s what it means to be your becoming. That’s the becoming that Nietzsche and Deleuze talk about. Don’t even bother thinking about asceticism; we all know it’s a sham. Don’t even bother the Indians about it; they probably know it too, deep down. What we have to do is take from Buddhism what it can teach us. We combine it with our Western ideas, with our resolve, our ‘right effort’; we mix this with our desire to help, to be a body of connections. If we become this desire, this resolve, then we are Buddhists — at least in the Zen sense, in the sense truest to Gautama’s example. And then maybe someone in India will study our example, see our errors, and do something even better. This is the thing worth hoping for.
November 7th, 2008 | #
Perhaps the misunderstanding is in the crude closeness of the word. It’s not become; it’s be-come. Be-cum. Be the return of yourself to every passing present.
November 7th, 2008 | #
And I was thinking of it as a birthing. I was trying to say that birth and death are irrelevant to the existence of a being.
November 8th, 2008 | #
“Do you understand?”
The condescension of teaching is the part source of my dissolution with the attainability of any enlightenment while inhabiting a body. I have sat at many mens’ feet while they preached as you preach, and I have agreed with what they said but seen no evidence of it in their lives. I do understand, on a philosophic level, but I’ve never seen anything approaching a human who behaves as such in life. Mastery of religion becomes pride in every body. Do not make the distinctly American mistake of exempting Buddhism (even Zen, which I admit is much more compelling than other variations) from the regime of organized religion; Buddhism equally enacts Power, Guruship, Mastery. A Zen Master is one who has done what you have described. It must be obvious to you that any body who considers himself a Master is immediately dharma-ridden.
The fact that Buddha stayed behind in his body in order to teach illustrates that the foundation of buddhism–of any religion–is Power. All prophets organize bodies into disciples, even Nietzsche.
The argument will be that a body could remain solitary, in the mountains perhaps, not become a teacher, and remain pure of attachments. I’ve said how I feel about that in the piece itself, but now I also wonder: if one body can attain enlightenment alone, why does the addition of bodies in the environment around that body effect anything? When all of those bodies are fueled by exactly the same divine Power. No, a solitary enlightenment is an illusion, that the meditator allows himself.
My point is that we ought not to seek or expect or philosophize about enlightenment while we inhabit bodies. We must be patient and await the transformation of our Power, we must wait for Shiva to dance over our bodies and nations, that if we seek to rejoin the Power that drives us, we must first seek destruction.
I will not try to renounce desire for recognition, because I think that my words and my being could do some good for society, on a material and political level, and that good ought not to be sacrificed for any spiritual construct. I only seek to be honest with myself about this.
November 8th, 2008 | #
Wow. Just to step out of character for a second, Jed, I want you to know that I’m loving this dialogue — I think we’re rubbing up on precisely the difference between our thinking, which is really more of a difference of focus, audience, and method than an ideological conflict. If you read my thesis, you’ll see how differently we think; having read yours, it seems to me that we have the same aims, but disagree on how they should be pursued.
First off, I don’t distrust Power the way you do. I have always sought a Master. I say to myself, “If I could just find that one great artist that comes closest to doing what I want to do, I will finally have the legacy with which to begin.” I have always sought a Zen Master, and I am increasingly aware of how largely I am driven by this desire. I consider you a particularly self-propelled individual. And I think you are lucky to be such, either by nature or by circumstance. I have always avoided conflict, and there is little, so far as I am aware, that I believe in. At this point, I go more with Bowie than with Lennon, at least in arbitrary song lyric form:
Bowie (’Quicksand’ on Hunky Dory): “Don’t believe in yourself, don’t deceive with belief, knowledge comes with death’s release”
Lennon (’God’ on Plastic Ono Band): “I don’t believe in bible… buddha… gita… yoga… zimmerman… beatles… I just believe in me, yoko and me, that’s reality”
For whatever reason, I’ve arrived at a point where I see two enormous world views represented by those lyrics. I used to be more of the Lennon type, and then something happened in the last eight months and I have no confidence left. Suddenly I’m a Foucauldian, and belief, knowledge, and reality are just the catchwords of subjectivity (or subjection, they’re the same, equally free, equally manufactured, equally natural and equally cultural, equally wonderful and divine, and equally sinister). Belief seems a sort of deception to me, a strengthening of the self in the name of God knows what. Subjectivity is something I’m now resentful towards. I am a ressentiment man. In how I use the term, ’subjectivity’ means the sense of responsibility and purpose, intentionality, schedule, goals, a job well done — it means being driven by a sense of self. Suddenly I lack all of that, and I believe I have a good idea why. You can email me if you want to know about that.
I envy your patience and your Shiva. I do not believe in either, which is to say, I have not a patient cell in my body nor in my mind, and my only sense of destiny is apocalyptic. And yet I do nothing. My body says do, my mind says ‘What? You again?’ I feel it every day: my mind is rejecting the aims, the subjectivity it once had. I believe I know why. I will not ask you to renounce your desire for recognition, but I do not need to tell you, I hope, that such desire can lead one astray. But perhaps not you; you seem confident in yourself. It’s the unselfconfident ones that should never gain recognition, and I suppose it’s they that I speak to. Elliott Smith is my example of an unselfconfident man (and also of one who did, but never should have gained recognition). I will go with song lyrics again, and again, somehow, John Lennon is the demon.
Elliott Smith (’Good to Go’, from the self-titled album): “I wouldn’t need a hero if I wasn’t such a zero.”
John Lennon (’Working Class Hero’ from Plastic Ono Band): “A working class hero is something to be, if you want to be a hero well just follow me.”
Perhaps Lennon was being sarcastic. It doesn’t matter. I take his lyrics to show what the 60s and early 70s were capable of: producing idols that one could actually believe in. I only have to think of my Dad, who loved Clapton and the guitar heroes of the 60s — those white guys, who for all their drug abuse, rebelliousness, and coolness, played teen God to a whole generation of young professionals. Today, there are a lot fewer idols. I idolize Kevin Garnett a little bit. He plays b-ball as it was played on Mount Olympus. But beyond that, I agree with the sentiment of Elliott Smith (his lyrics date from the grunge era, early 90s). We don’t have to take ‘zero’ in the emo sense. To me, zero just means ‘empty.’ I wouldn’t need a Zen Master if I didn’t feel so empty. Which is not to say ‘lacking’ — I know now, after reading enough Deleuze, that emptiness is not lack. It’s historical, it’s cultural, it has to do with your family but not just with your family. I need a hero, always have, probably always will. I need a rubric, a routine, an outline, a structure, in which to inseminate my instinct. I experience my zero as a potential… I feel constantly aware of my potentiality, and not my actuality. I have no idea who I am, only who I think I can be. And I look around myself and see others who seem to think similarly.
It is they, whoever they are, that I write for. This is a passage from my book that I happen to like (there are few):
I want this to be a confession. I’m not sure what of, but I’m in a confessional mood, and such moments ought to be taken advantage of. I am obsessive about people. I do not care for most of them but those I do care for I hire as demons or angels over my soul. Over my soul as in I allow them to creep in close, so close that they can stab or blow up or adore me, or all at the same time as is most commonly the case. I am not in thrall to the stampede. I glide swiftly enough and the hooves and muscled bodies mostly miss me. Sometimes I run along and help to trample the helpless. But I am inevitably drawn to those who stand amiss along the edge. They appear themselves not to know what they’re after, and their sly look tells you that you do. They are the intrigue. I would tell you to be wary of such people, but that would be ironic coming from me. I keep my assassins closer than my bodyguards, and I rather like it that way.
This is my last point: I have always treated Pinko’s as a place to play all of my characters at once. Largely, it has been a forum for me to keep up an adolescent tendency left over from my Ayn Rand days, my high school days, when I wrote letters to editors of the student run communist newspaper telling them how wrong they all were and how right Ayn Rand was. I’m not proud of having acted that way, but looking back, seeing how I transitioned from Rand to Kerouac to Nietzsche to Heidegger and finally to Deleuze, I realize that I am only an eternal disciple phrasing his intuitions in the phraseology of his idols. And it has hit a strange strain with Deleuze, because he took this discipleship and turned it into an oeurve more beautiful than any other I know of. He wrote monographs on all his favorite philosophers, using all of them to express his own intuitions. He did what I like to believe I would have done were I motivated, French, and writing in an environment of intensely engaging ideological combat.
I too am only seeking to be honest about this, so let me clarify further: when I say ‘we,’ when I quote some Zen master, and when I talk to ‘you’ on this blog, as far as I can tell, I am only ever waging ideological battles between some phantoms I like and others I don’t like, on some stage somewhere half between the reality of you and I, and the reality of my pasts, my hoped-for futures, and whatever other forces of which I am unconscious guide the conduct of my thought. I am well aware of this. When I say ‘we,’ I am writing for others I believe to exist in a similar pattern of thinking to my own. How shall I define this pattern? Let’s say that it is thus: a sense of responsibility is perpetually comabatted by a sense of unreality. I’ll leave the typo in: a negativity is annihilated by another negativity, and inactivity is all that survives. It seems to me that this conflict can only either be meditated out of existence or TURNED INTO SOMETHING PRACTICAL. This is what I turn to in the third part of my thesis. Breaking down what the subject does. Escaping and re-entering Earth. De- and re-territorialization. Because to me, subjectivity is the oppressor, it is the ‘human’. Moreover it is the repressor, the enshamer; it is Noah’s children feeling embarrassed in the sight of their father fucking. It’s taking over everything, making everything its own. Attachments, responsibilities: I want to desire the things I desire without them becoming something I loathe. And they always do become that. They always do. So I turn them off completely. Something I like becomes a responsibility and then I turn it off completely. I enjoy, I believe, and then I rescind: empty. When I am around certain people, I can tell that this aspect of my personality perturbs them, offends them, as though my disposition were an affront to the entire human race. I want to work with that reaction. Everything I write, Jed, is only about me and these phantom-others I believe to exist and whom I tell myself I care about. I would like to be an affront, and I want to understand why, what it can do, what it is doing, who is doing it, and where it can go. I want to write for people living in denial of their desire for a hero. And I think you write for other people, like yourself, and perhaps you have an idea of who they are. And I think that we can be much more compelling with our thinkings combined. Not that we should write each others books, but only that we should keep fighting at this so that we reach some sort of ground that is common, because that ground already exists in the Real, just not in our present Symbolic. Let’s work through the Imaginary until all three realms are in tandem. In any case it’s Power we’re after; what does the word mean to you?
November 11th, 2008 | #
it strikes me that all of this — this comabat between responsibility and unreality, this anti-heroism — is the squatting ground of the hipster.
November 11th, 2008 | #
This is really interesting, sadly, my computer’s gone and broke again, and cybercafes (they’re not actually cafes; they’re really paranoid places. I had to give a FULL SET OF FINGERPRINTS to get into this one) aren’t so good for thinking.
My posts in this thread are also grown out of dissolutionment, obviously, so I was surprised that your shad, too, but oppositely. I am certainly wary of the pitfalls and traps and egotisms of the desire for recognition, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue because I seem to be a collecter of broken machineries, fellowships that don’t pay me and leave me stranded in the third world broke, rejection slips, air pollutions, and arrogant gurus driven by my American money which doesn’t exist (see: fellowships that don’t pay up). And lots of broken machinery. OK, I’ll post again when I’m in a more reflective mood.
We are both intellectual hipsters but neither of us manage to pull off the sexy aesthetics of the thing.
November 11th, 2008 | #
Yeah, let’s not try to.
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
November 11th, 2008 | #
To go in another direction: I’ve been reading the Upanisads (in brilliant translation by my mentor here, P.Lal, who makes them read a bit like modernist poetry) and have been richly rewarded. I needed to share these slokas from the Amrta-Bindu Upanisad with you:
6:
“Do not think
thought-worthy
that which is unthinkable.
Do no think
that that
which is unthinkable
Is not worthy
of thought
No such bias.”
10:
“The Supreme Truth
is this:
‘ there is no obstruction
there is no commencement
I am not fettered
I do not seek liberation
I have not attained liberation.’”
And
18:
The profoundly intelligent
having delved deep into books
for knowledge and insight
should discard book-knowledge
discard the husk
to obtain rice.”
November 12th, 2008 | #
the Power bit is interesting to me recently. In my fiction I’ve been treating it as an increasing abstraction but with more physicality–ashit, I can’t describe it. If you have a few moments to read, (hypocritical from I who still haven’t touched your thesis, as soon as I get a computer I have a printer ready and will print it)
http://www.jedicist.org/blog/?p=39
November 12th, 2008 | #
WE’RE GETTING SPAMMED.
November 13th, 2008 | #
Just a note - until I can get this spam fudge figured out, you’re going to have to be logged in to comment. Actually, maybe I just figured it out: you’re going to have to be logged in to comment.
Also, guys, this is a great discussion. Keep it up, and I’d like to get involved or at least spotlight some things that have affected me in here - maybe when I have time on Saturday, if I have time on Saturday. God I hope so. The best thing about having a day job is having nothing to worry about on the weekends.
November 13th, 2008 | #
Cool quotes from the Upanisads- though not so much another direction as a succinct statement of your initial point. When I first read them they hit me hard. The best Zen masters would not disagree with any of it, but few, if any, could put it so well. As for number 18, soon, Jed– soon.
I’ve read most of the Zephayer piece. I like it best at the beginning. I asked about Power because I’m more interested in its internal functioning. This is what my email to you was about. Anyway, I think it’s problematic to treat power abstractly… doesn’t that make it an ‘abstract machine’ such as D&G talk about in the Kafka book? They say an abstract machine is a dead machine.. so far as reader impact goes..
I’m not giving up my defense of Zen masters yet. I hoped you would address my long comment more directly, but I am aware that the tone was neither energizing nor manly. The argument continues in my next post.
November 14th, 2008 | #
I’m having trouble maintaining my side of the argument because i’m not convinced of my origional point. I do believe that what is is divine, and that what isn’t is as well. I believe in abstraction but not in death. In this city I feel the full weight of unsatisfyable desire, and it feels inescapable. Yet I feel how many more desires I have satisfied than 85% of the population, and feel the weight of their desire, of their hunger, and am powerless against it. I can survive here well, and I am no one’s servant. I cannot eat a good loaf of wheat bread or cheddar cheese or drink dark beer–or beer without glycerin, for that matter. I cannot love. I find myself unstoppably attracted to white flesh, and that disgusts me.
When we accept a spiritual master or a guru, we treat abstract power as a reality. Is that better than treating real power abstractly? Let me read your next post, and we’ll take up that issue.
I dismiss out of hand your distinction based on self confidence. The last thing I want to do is pseudopsychologize it, but it sounds to me like you’re making excuses for yourself.
Everyone needs heroes, heroes to fit the moment, they are units of significance only. My heroes recently have done a lot to justify and excuse my addictions, and I thank them for that: ginsberg, who lived for seven months in North Kolkata buggering poets that I cannot find, burroughs who exiled himself, pynchon. They are only who I need them to be. I would hate to spend time with any of them in real life.
I need to return to d & g to get grounding, an odd thing to turn to them for, so I can stop contradicting myself constantly.
November 15th, 2008 | #