re edited
The cobble streets are empty, the birds sing in peace. Across the square, over the bushes lining the street, a single bicycle stands chained to a signpost.
I sit down and employ the method. It is a clear day, the air is crisp and cool. Like apple season. When the season of labor thickens. When wars begin. The day is just beginning, the sun is only rising. I put my hands into my pockets, and watch those passing with their lives in their pockets. Under trees wavering in the wind, one goes by now. Chattering away in the morning stillness. Making something this early in the day. I should produce something like him. I stand up, survey my surroundings, choose a direction, select an object on the horizon, and begin.
The man of business on the corner, a hurried look in his face. The spectral glow hovering suddenly about him. Split second reaction in my mind. “Make an argument for this.” And so I say all of this. The becomings he could’ve but did not. Life an abortive seduction, a seduction realigned to the plane of the one. The plane of callings, the demand of necessity. Ambition and nervous energy and goddam hypocritical but nothing to do with laziness or ideology or power, just a cultivation one undergoes, a cultivation of ones singular and separated as a matter of course.
And so The great fantasy, says the genealogist, is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. A swarm of bees, no less than we, forms a democracy. But supposedly we have a will, so what wills the separate wills to come together? How does one learn to do what one can, what does one do as one learns? Says the genealogist, If it has been possible to constitute a knowledge of the body, this has been by way of an ensemble of military and educational disciplines. Yellowjackets sitting at desks learning how to use their stinger…. is that all a student is?
One ought to be more specific about this constituting, this cultivating one undergoes. This separating and singularizing. In post-nativity, there is great passivity. Then, slowly, apertures to the mind become the apparatus of knowledge. Taking in becomes a knowing how to react. On a larger scale, conquest and crusade give way to correction, the spread of democracy. A grand co-erection of souls, held accountable to some enormous limit or end. ‘How I learned to love the bomb’; the alpha in alphaville. Then the cold war ends, the earth starts warming, and co-erection begins to seek for a social concordance of responsible, purposive subjects reaching around the globe. A bloodless flood.
And still science leads the way. Human sciences, social sciences, earth sciences, trump-of-religion sciences. Quantum physics replaces the superstition and paranoia of the vampire-count with the quantifiable reality of scientific account so that where once mere intuition guessed at unseen aeffective spectrums invoking “spirits” or “demons” to explain events not understood by common sense the sciences give a subject confidence in a ground foundation of knowledge and in the possibility of building truth upon it and in this lies one’s seduction.
All for one and one for all. Held accountable, held to a system of accounts, included in the count. What Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about an unnamed South American city can be said of the entire extending habitat of scientifico-civilizing man: “The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.” Alas, now it is such complicated frivolity. And one would like to rejoice in this.
But as of yet, nothing complete. Precious little to show. The account consisting in a profile and a wall, or in the story told by grandparents when they take you to the airport. The unknown dispersed over a range of remembrances, the becoming characterized by a sequence of moments in time, significant as to what one had been and was to be, a flow of life channeled into the watertight table of contents. Fear of the unknown, the vampire, the count, giving way to a count ability, accountability, consulting replacing numerology, a uniformless militant order integrating a population of singularities, ones, under a uniform expectation of lawful action in accordance… and yet some bicycles remaining unchained… accountability, stymying a core dance, but then in the breeze, air whipping into one’s ears, one hearing nothing… all ac-count-able, all countable and bound to an account. But the streets are empty, one can peddle oneself anywhere… and then running into it again, not just money or the facebook not just science but a story told about oneself and learned over and again anew: the insidious habit of autobiography. “What did one do after college?” Well…
*
The account is stymied by an encounter. The writing of oneself into a map of life meets with an alterity it does not comprehend. Immediately left naked in a gap, neither one nor the other can distinguish itself apart. The meeting a moment of absolute unity: a part. Eyes tangle with eyes, blinking and blinding and all gone into one another, subjectification a haze, signifiance and interpretosis shot stopped still. The blood boils, the flood comes up to a levee -
Why play the game as though there was only one way to go about it?
