There is a patch that
was a hole.

It holds those things
of the past and
of the distant
future.

Where are those things
we believe which
do not exist
yet?

I reach
through to dog
eared wholes
dismembered.

I patch.

-

There have been few
moments.  A few
ashes. I am
here to
see them spark.

-

I lose myself in
the hole. I patch
it loosely and I
paint it simply so
that I might
come along a
stranger
and see.

A pithydamb, in two parts. Please play ‘Dust Bird Baths,’ the first track on this album, first:

http://fat-cat.co.uk/fatcat/release.php?id=285

1.

The diplomacy of exile
must be learned, says a
balky mule. The rule of a
mule, what else could there
be for those who cannot
reproduce their parents’ genes,
refusing to wear their worn out
jeans. The rule of unchosen
exile, of wanting to be what isn’t
set free, of wanting to be wanting.
Wanting for what. For the right
question of course, for it is an
exile from answers, a mule
cannot answer to reproduction
and so phe learns to be
diplomatic, sensitive and wanting.

So much at once so let us
just call the mule Sophie. She or he
is too sensitive and not enough
senseable, not able enough to make
good sense, not enough able to make
good of the two cents left
in a pair of worn out jeans.
He or she doesn’t much see
sense in all of this talk of genes.
Who does. Doctors
and thoroughbreds, to race or mend
the racer. So, particularly sensitive
to matters of race
Sophie walks around, smiling sometimes
sometimes not. Who could
expect him or her to race with
such unshapely hips and bowed
shoulders or just flat out
enormous donkey ears. No,
neither the race course nor
the mule was attracted to
one another so then there
was a desert and then an
oasis and then the mule
wonders if there is more
than mere nourishment to the
world. This is Sophie’s world, so
read philosophy or poetry or
whatever books best express
your character but phe is in
an oasis and really the
library is a very boring place.
Or at least, a mule can only
sit still so long.

In any case it’s movement
which is most attractive to a
mule and so, a learned learning
diplomat, Sophie meets other
mules at the watering hole and
faces attract but being irreproductive
there is mostly just an exchange
of sensitivity and satisfaction of
want. This being what a
watering hole leads to and so
doesn’t the oasis become boring
too, first the books and then
even the carnal nourishments
and then clearly ever so clearly
everything else falls away and
the mule is left with the
bare life of desiring-production.
Which is to say one must
produce something, after all,
this being god knows whose
will, a will one signs at
birth that a life will exceed
one’s death…

The mule sights the will
while standing in the oasis.
Having crossed the desert and
had done with libraries phe
senses the fact that a will
was signed, a will assigned,
a willing desire to will
to produce, and this is when
the mule meets someone very
special. Not someone, but the
one. One’s very own one.
Not an other, do not get me
confused, do not confuse your
one with your other, for this is
what we all do and it is holding
us back (None of us know what
we need; that is what makes us
who we are),,, which is to
say the one is the bug
which desires to produce and
came with our genes and jeans.
It was the bug that signed
the will and crawled into the
mule’s head, for better or
worse, it was fleeing
the bug that brought the mule
into the desert, it was
hiding from the bug that
brought Sophie to the library,
it was the bug, all of it was
the bug, the bug wants everything
out and if you sit still too
long god knows the bug will
begin scratching in your skull.

But whosoever was it that
fed the bug, wonders the mule,
staring soberly at the will with
its little bug signature. Was
it not the maker of the race,
the builder of the course, the
attendees to the grand prix,
was it not namely one’s parents
and by not wearing their
jeans does one not elude
their genes. They were the
makers, they, they thought they
were taking down the machine
but then it picked up what
they made and thanked them
for the shiny new appendage.
The mule says no, I will be
all legs and no arms, I
will move but will not make,
or what I make will be
as ethereal and shortlived as the
belches of an English toad.
The mule stands in an oasis
avoiding the race and admiring
the myriad races. Sensitive,
diplomatic, and wanting to be
wanting, the mule has seen
what all making really is.
Says some learned German named
Gebser: All “making,” whether
in the form of spell casting or
of the reasoned technical
construction of a machine,
is an externalization of inner
powers or conditions and as
such their visible, outward
form. Projection, says the
mule, all those thoroughbreds
with their projects and
projected victories, all of
that is the projection of what
one already has and so why
listen to the bug when really
the bug is just the callous
carnivorous cantankerous
fool who has forgotten how
fulfilling bare life is, already
in itself foolhearty enough
to satisfy all equestrial types.
The mule says this while
sighting the will which the bug in
the brain signed and then says no –
to that race I shall not be consigned.

And so resigned, the light of day
dimming over the oasis, a
projector screen lights up and
the screen begins to flicker.
For every mule a screen.
It helps one not to scream,
too many facts to gleam,
a one debugged is a one unscreened,
left open and available to the
surrounding scene, the mule needs
a rule and it is a rule of
exile, exile from jeans and
genes and all the worn out
scenes already tried and
already tired no matter how
new so I am going out tonight
all the same it doesn’t
matter who or what I see
I will see spontaneously and
without a will, I will, you
see, and no, let’s stay in and
watch a movie.

2.

(From The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, 1949, around the time the piedigger wrote an essay on ‘The Question Concerning Technology’)

At one time man himself, or, more precisely, the human body, was the instrument of sight or thought across distances - tele-vision and telesthesia - or the perceptor of the faint radiation of the aura, while today man fashions instruments for such purposes.

This is not an opinion as to the value of the natural, or the lack of value of the artificial instruments. Yet the very fact of the quantity, indeed the quantification of the constructed artifacts could well cause us to reflect on the phenomenon even where we are speaking of valuable precision instruments. Detractors of such instruments will decry them as being substitutes, defenders will point to the enhancement they bring, and both will be able to marshall weighty arguments to defend their positions. But this conflict of opinions does not resolve the problem; it merely achieves the termporary triumph of one or the other opinion.

Yet to the extent that the machine is an objectivation of an externalization of man’s own capabilities, it is in psychological terms a projection. We have already spoken of the decisive role of projection in the emergence of conscoiusness: it is only because of these projections, which render externally visible the powers lying dormant within man, that he is able, or more precisely, that it is possible for him to become aware of this intrinsic potentiality which is capable of being comprehended and directed.

All “making,” whether in the form of spell-casting or of the reasoned technical construction of a machine, is an externalization of inner powers or conditions and as such their visible, outward form. Every tool, every instrument and machine is only a practical application (that is also a perspectival-directed use) of “inherent” laws, laws of one’s own body rediscovered externally. All basic physical and mechanical laws such as leverage, traction, bearing, adhesion, all constructions such as the labyrinth, the vault, etc., all such technical achievements or discoveries are pregiven in us. Every invention is primarily a rediscovery and an imitative construction of the organic and physiological pre-given “symmetries” or laws in man’s structure which can become conscious by being externally projected into a tool.

This is equally true of the natural capacities at the disposal of magic man we spoke of above such as telesthesia and telepathy; but it is not true of our radio and television. Today, European man supercedes, that is, excludes time and space by utilizing such contrivances since he is caught up in the consciousness-sustaining world of space and time and is scarcely able to achieve this supersession any longer by himself. Magic man does not need this exclusion at all since he lives and moves and is absorbed in a spaceless-timeless world of which he is a part. In this respect the acts of yogis are not miracles but natural occurrences; the miracle would be if such phenomena or events unbound by space and time did not have their place in the spaceless-timeless world.

The European has for the most part forfeited these capacities through the unfolding of consciousness and has replaced them by their projected objectivation or externalization into television and radio. (The giant telescopes belong to this same context inasmuch as magic man “saw” and “knew” those phenomena which we “discover” via such instruments, though in a merely optical and sectoral form.) We might also say that we would not have such instruments if we did not possess within ourselves the genuine capability of such achievements as they permit.

This consideration also points up the limits of technology, for technology is definitely unable to bestow on man the omnipotence which he imagines himself to have. On the contrary, technology necessarily leads to an “omn-impotence” to the extent that the process of physical projection is not realized. It is, for example, a requirement of a projection that it not be left without temporal limits; it must be integrated. But such integration is possible only if the projection is retracted, and retraction can be realized only out of a new conscoiusness structure. Psychic projections can be undone only by conscious mental understanding. Does this perhaps suggest that material-physical projections can be resolved through the integrating spiritual capacity of diaphany? Be that as it may, we have in any event a possibility of resolving the problem of technology, a problem which cannot be solved merely by further technological advancement.