1.

I’ve begun to wonder whether I’d grow too proud, becoming used to seeing souls being used by the system.  In all things one either uses or is used - all systematic things.  Love is the absence of any system.  But in life, in career and consumption and capital, one is used to using and being used.  So I use it: I use the system, counting all my expenditures to my benefit.  I say of every dime spent ‘It is for my enjoyment’ - the wash, the gasoline, the bills, the beekeeping.  Be a yeasayer.  Affirm it all for some impersonal purpose, over and aside from profession, from home and family.  Make use of the system in which one’s’elf is subject.  It is better to use it for oneself than to avoid it altogether.

Indeed, I’ve become too proud.  I write like Nietzsche, and if I get as good at making everything my own as he did, I’ll schiz over.  I’ll become everyone everywhere from all times, and will be utterly unfit to use or be used - an uncarvable block, an unavoidable becoming-Daoist.

I do not want that.  I merely wish to lose my way.

2.

The question is of course: where did all of this come from?  The buildings, this train, the mass of students boarding now at Fordham station - what made them happen, what makes it happen again?  What made Egypt, what made pyramids and sweatshops and hardcore porn?  That is the question - given one has courage enough to confront it.  It is not, in spite of Heidegger and Hamlet, about “being.”  Nor is it in being “alienated” that the question comes to arise.  No one “forgets” the question of being - no one falls into illusion or out from blessedness.  The question is of becoming: what do we become?  What is becoming for us, what do we find becoming in others, what do we expect of them, what do they expect of us, how do these expectations create a being that stifles becoming and what is its name and has it always been?  Will it always be?  And will we learn to become within it?

3.

Why do we do it?!  Why do we crowd on to this train, push in a herd up these stairs, one step at a time, staring the person ahead of us in the back of the head?  Why!?  Because we love it!

4.

The world’s a game,
Save that the puppets pull at their own strings

Society is now one polished horde
Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and the Bored (Lord Byron, Don Juan)

If, then, my thesis is true, a person needs only to ponder how corrupting boredom is for people, tempering his reflections more or less according to his desire to diminish or increase his impetus, and if he wants to press the speed of the motion to the highest point, almost with danger to the locomotive, he needs only to say to himself: Boredom is the root of all evil. (Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or)

‘I suppose you think I’m an awful fool, Bendrix, not to have guessed.  Why didn’t she leave me?’

Had I got to instruct him about the character of his own wife?  The poison was beginning to work in me again.  I said, ‘You have a good safe income.  You’re a habit she’s formed.  You’re security…. Sometimes I thought you knew all about it and didn’t care.  Sometimes I longed to have it out with you - like we are doing now when it’s too late.  I wanted to tell you what I thought of you.’

‘What did you think?’

‘That you were her pimp.  You pimped for me and you pimped for them, and now you are pimping for the latest one.  The eternal pimp.  Why don’t you get angry, Henry?’

‘I never knew.’

‘You pimped with your ignorance.  You pimped by never learning how to make love with her, so she had to look elsewhere.  You pimped by giving opportunities… You pimped by being a bore and a fool, so now somebody who isn’t a bore and a fool is playing about with her in Cedar Road.’ (Conversation between a cuckold and his wife’s adulterer in The End of the Affair, Graham Greene)

5.

Spiked with poison’s pride, I grow bored with society.  Marriage, systemetized love, seem no longer sensible.  Have we had done with being, with serving as security for one another?  We are all of us living in our Other’s Shadow, and the mother we leave behind is dormant in the base of our spines.  I reject it, this foolishness and boredom, this serfdom in ignorance, and am left with - the internet, the turntable.  Is it true that we only ever interact with a projection of ourselves?

Too far, too fast!  Dreams fly into the mists of dawn.  Who am I to write this way?  No one, nobody- and yet it seems it must be said: This is a matter of honest prurience.  I am neither Nietzsche nor Rilke nor Rimbaud, I am closer to Malkmus-

woke up to people so tall to you
i can’t so i won’t stand
up chuck break luck
look for the splinters you might see where they come in
go down, sweet yardley
i won’t let you fall down, sweet yardley
i won’t let you fall down, here, now
ah - goddam the guts and the gore
nobody’s crying ’cause there’s no one to score for
come up sweet randy
i won’t let you fall - what you got to lose
what you got to prove?
who you gonna screw down here… now
here now.. i am.. here now ..i am… here… now…

your life is about to-to come
away from the mirror in a rainshed
generation
fight generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
fight this generation
stop right (Pavement)

7.

Rising out of bed, I soon look into the holy mirror and see: I am wholly myself, punctured and pored with a thousand tiny holes.  Who performs the acupuncture?  Who will take out the splinters?  Pimped and prodded by bores, fools, bitches and fakes - who will take my picture?

Caught up in a being of becoming, becoming a machine, desiring to be becoming, to be coming, constantly coming, I watch the record spin.  I spin madly, in ecstatic euphanasia, a ring around CocoRosie -

tiny Spirit in a k-hole
bloated like sog-gy cer-e-al
God will come and wash away
our tatoos and all the cocaine
and all of the aborted babies
will turn into little bambies

wounded river push along
searching for that desert song
and mozart’s requiem will play
on tiny speakers made of clay
tell my Mother that i love her
martin luther you’re an Angel

charming monkey saunter swagger
drunken donkey limbs disjointed
your chest is a petting zoo
mexican pony fucked up shoes
i dreamt one thousand basketball courts
nothing Holier than sports

dragonfly kiss your tail
precious Robot built so frail
universe of milk and ember
your hot kiss in mid december
what’s God name i can’t remember
through the crack eye lovely weather (CocoRosie)

8.

The thing that is latent in a phonograph record, the thing that is revealed when I press a button and turn on the machine - shouldn’t we call that ‘life’?  Shall I insist, like the mandarins of China, that even life depends on a button which an unknown being can press?  And you yourselves - how many times have you wondered about mankind’s destiny, or asked the old questions: ‘Whence are we going?  Like the unheard music that lies latent in a phonograph record, where are we until God orders us to be born?’  Don’t you see that there is a parallelism between the destinies of men and images? (Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel)

9.

Wanting to be among neither the bores nor the bored, wanting neither to be a boar nor a board, on capital’s ark, phe embarks, a renegade rocket laughing over Calvary.

shallow people say oh no
because they think it’s contagious
more shallow people say oh yeah
because they think it’s a masterpiece (Animal Collective)

oh god (The Dodos)

11.

Instead of bemoaning how the progressive externalization of our mental capacities in “objective” instruments (from writing on paper to relying on a computer) deprives us of human potentials, one should focus on the liberating dimension of this externalization: the more our capacities are transposed onto external machines, the more we emerge as “pure” subjects, since this emptying equals the rise of substanceless subjectivity.  It is only when we will be able to fully rely on “thinking machines” that we will be confronted with the void of subjectivity (Organs without Bodies: Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek)

Trying to unplug the thinking machine
that calls me I, and you you,
Missing what was written first
because it struck a core

I sit after a long first workday
during which I had to reflect
in between copies, in between making
binders, how strange and timely
it was that I would find those
words of Zizek

I wonder

What void
less what substance
shall come to exist
and is believing in things
enough

I sat in that swivel chair
having had my office introduction
and given the timesheets
and tax forms, wondered
to what I was becoming subject
and would I now be always surfing
in moments when bored
and bound to sit there
working or workless
mechanically clicking at the glare -

The day gets longer and longer,
I no longer wonder why.

But, Zizek says,
“What Deleuze calls ‘desiring machines’
concerns something wholly different
from the mechanical: the ‘becoming-
machine’.”  And “The Deleuzian schizo,
on the other hand,
merrily identifies with this infinitely complex machine
which is our body: he experiences
this impersonal machine
as his highest assertion,
rejoicing in its constant tickling.”

Ah, deus ex machina…. very well…

I plug in.

12.

Trying to remember,
But my feelings can’t know for sure.
Try to reach out
But it’s gone…

Lucky stars in your eyes…
I am walking the cow…

I really don’t know how I came here…
I really don’t know why I’m stayin’ here…
Oh, Oh, Oh. I’m walking the cow…

Tried to point my finger,
But the wind keeps blowin’ me around
In circles…circles…

Lucky stars in your eyes…
I’m walking the cow…

I really don’t know what I have to fear…
I really don’t know why I have to care…
Oh, Oh, Oh. I’m walkin’ the cow…
Lucky stars in your eyes… (Daniel Johnston)

what grinds me down is having a name.  Which we then try to attach meaning onto.  The obligation to provide significance to the labels I was given at birth.  Go forth, young man, to seek fortune.  It gives such desire to be.  To exist in a broader way than one body can provide.

I want to exist in such a way that at least two bodies, or a mass of bodies, believing and being same can grant.  Why must our atmans be cleaved and fragmented and enveloped in skin? Perhaps only that we can feel each others skins, clammy and pocked though they may be.  Through any other alone can I seek to remove self from myself.  From my desires which must never be stifled or repressed, only satisfied.  Only addiction.  Perhaps I am addicted to my self, my shell, my inner life, though it often bores me, certainly leaves some hollowness, a hollowness that will perhaps one day be explained by particle physics.  I am losing skin cells, especially thru my flaking scalp.  Which has never stopped flaking in all my years of consciousness.  Perhaps it is bits of my mind dropping off, ideas lost forever, escaping out the top of my head unattractively, constantly defiling any façade of hygiene I may manage to sustain.  Maybe little flakes of my consciousness are leaping off my head to try to join with you, or maybe with YOU.

Bindu.  The dot that hung over the moon, above Aum, that bindu the highest pearch that a signifier can attain, the closest a signifier can be to significance.  Hanging over the eternal vowel, the rushing of air between my lips, the chard-bindu that hangs over all my ink, that pushes sound out of the mouth which consumes, that is the fruit of all prana, all that is taken in.  I namaskar the bindu, the Chandra, and the O that it hangs over.  I namaskar the blank page which it stains, I namaskar the ink that stains it, I namaskar the mouth that utters it, I namaskar the air that is shaped and the body that shapes that sound, the gift of Chandra-bindu, the half-moon, the eternal purity of the mouth unstained by the pollution of our cities.  That moon blank page that will never be stained by human tough.  That has no feet to throw myself at.  The only action I can take against the moon is to see it, salute it, I can never take I before Chandra, which waxes and wanes as I do, that shines dramatically everywhere I will ever go.  The moon that teaches my body to be in bondage to nature alone, that it is nature alone, in bondage to itself so that perhaps I will escape while my body takes my place in bondage to you, Chandra.

I can’t see.  Light enters my eyes when there is no light, darkness unyeilds to distinctions and frames over which I can interpose any simple reality, impervious to my castes and religions and regions and races, and I can no longer distill who ought to be killing who, much less any whys.  Trains burn before their destinations, leaving tracks to turn to livelihoods and bodies left empty in stations waiting for departures they might or might not be supposed to take, the timetables bereft of any meaning, the clock whirring about the empty side of maha kal thirsty and satiated durga, laxmi spilling money that ought to have never existed.  Spending money that never was, eating food that never was grown, massaging spices into meats unslaughtered, words written with no inspiration.  Artists alone with no desire to represent, earwax begun to flow leaving ears defenseless, addicts lining up for a taste.

(ghobi begun to lay asia to waste, empty lands that once bred life breed heat alone, foreignness comes home, domestic strangeness of selves unsaddled with identities, places misplaced and misfiled, this became conditional upon His glare and again fell unnaturally at His feet.  Crying lonelinesses set aflame and reduced to ash.  sweet glorified water drowning itself. Governments self-born skeptics.  Ophaloskeptic party sweeps the elections!

-=-=+

To like paan I like to like—cha and newness.

slow expansions of the mind silenced by today, by the filth of Kalima with casual blood and much and unsatisfactory but fierce darsan of a black rock with three gaudy eyes.  Killing after killing, rows of severed black goat heads innocent looking with big black eyes—the emptiness of the head while eating is the ideal indication of the uselessness of thought and emptiness of language which is never representative, sustains only illusions and cults and late night ticking typewriting heard throughout the Colony while third-party Diwali explosions sing over the city.

Haze doesn’t dim awareness.  Haze I bring upon myself—why—what have I been doing to myself?  Where is my peace? Am I seeking escape from myself?  What is it to converse aloud with myself for hours and hours about nothing, to have a full mind and nothing thinking, no reality, no stimulus because I’ve numbed my receptors.  And never having realized it, pursuing some productive insanity entirely elusive.

And landing on Sunday morning on the field of Kuruksetra once again.  Reminder of divinity I seem to be unconcerned with, seem to be incapable of incorporating into words without destructive abstraction and cliché.  Are synthesis of discussion, recognition of the underlying unity of Power impossible? Destructible indestructibility.

That links divinity and war, divinity and suffering, religion as simple acknowledgement of suffering, of physicality, the essences of matter itself matter being all, all being useless.  Not enough sensesàpandavas.  Selves lost.  We Lose Everything to Tendencies.  Addictions.  The body demeaned and molested by itself, addiction.  We lead our body into exile and it follows us unavoidably.  And it needs Jed to pull it up.  Self-abuse,  what leads me to self abuse?  it is only a Tendency.  And only when tendencies are destroyed will we be free.

There is only consciousness in twoness.  There is no consciousness in oneness.  Oneness cannot be described.

And so I talk aloud to myself.

Krishna is Arjuna’s Other, conscience, analyst, that he is unhappy with.  Self.  I, Wretch, lay wrestling with my god.  There is no Krishna outside, only self—advisor, disturber.  I can only council myself, not control myself.

Ksatrya—I submit myself to my work, to the battlefield of very-late capitalism,  kuruksetra.  In the midst of warriors, war will occur.  O, Raja, exterminate the war tendency!

————————————————–

Food is inexorably linked to karma, not to be escaped by breathing bodies.  To feed the self is to maintain one’s karma as he feeds his body.  To feed others is to feed karma itself, universal justice on which I depend.  All bodies must eat.  Therefore there is no ambiguity about who to feed-all must be fed, equally.  If we are not equal in merit or birth, let us be equal at least in our possession of bodies, in our food.  Let all be fed, whether they have been hungry for an hour or a day or years or a lifetime.  Food is the only thing in my life unambiguous, the only thing I am sure of.  Cooking is the only sacred duty I am sure of.

–

can the energy unexpended on unfulfilled desire be used? have I been given celibacy as a gift or a failure? the time will come and is not now, when I can only be I, when my path overlaps with multitudes, not precious individuals, when I walk, only the past walks with me.

when I walk, only the past walks with me.  journeys added to journeys, history accumulating over geography, personal geography expanding. 

There are seven main places I call my own.  boulder, providence, the bay, Tucson, kolkata, varanasi, and new york.  Home is wherever more than one night falls, I am a guest elsewhere.  I am a guest everywhere.

I am a guest everywhere.  A guest can do nothing but be humble.  Receive what is offered.  Suck the knowledge and prana a place can give, knowing that all knowledge is everywhere, and prana is equally.  Each place a one among the oceanic multitude of drifting peaks, a humming turbine of the great desiring machine that has spread filth everywhere on this earth.

The plastic cosmos

will        outlast its makers   who

dwelt in its interior  but

not its fluorescent divinity.

At least something ought to

outlast the plastic—            asphalt will not

nor, clothing nor,

terabytes.

nor,

LANDfills of

silent machinery

or quiet

LANDmines waiting

for a human      unlight step.

OUTlast?
I will not, my body says.

I will, I say.

I WILL the rot.