The Fly

And then, after having a good look at the most recent deposit in the done-with basin, which to my delight included banana peels and a few pieces of tofu, I flew over to the window to catch a bit of morning light, while my home’s inhabitants went back and forth with rather too much haste, in what appeared, from my peripheral observation at least, as preparations for a day to be spent in looking decent while doing things which keep one occupied.  This of course, making its way into my all-too-many-eyed vision, was of no interest in itself; but as is the way of me and mine, the flurry of bodily commotion gave my wings to taking flight in elongated circles from one end of the room to the other – if not with God-given intent, then at least for the purpose of making use of such flippant fluttering weblike arms that fill their surrounds with an unignorable buzz.  My circuit carried me over the hardwood floors, around shelves and through doorways, at the threshold of which I had always to take the greatest care in not flinging myself against the metal being always opened and closed – a game which gives me pleasure, which the athlete in me more than insignificantly enjoys.  I say this because – or rather, I should say, this game is always more than insignificant, as, of course, there is always the chance of near or even absolute demise – inattention for the briefest moment constituting the grave and exciting risk that I might be struck and sent spiraling into a corner, to be left, as is the fate of the unfortunate, a twitching, convulsing, regurgitating mess of stalwart cells in the unrelenting throes of life’s last revolt.  It is the athlete in me, the athlete, always scrupulous to take advantage of an opportunity for the renewal of one’s sense of valor, that flings one acrobatic into the bustle of scenes to which I would otherwise consider myself indifferent.  What these fellows are up to, whatsoever it is they’re preparing for, is of no consequence to me.  But that I should be left out of the fun?  That is quite simply out of the question.

After Post-Modernism

6 characters on couches in a dusty wood-paneled living space
-A charlatan
-A libertine
-A didactic thinker
-An indulgent
-A quack
-A yogi

Yogi: Anxiety, fear, the sense of discontentment and unfulfilment.  All of this, on a widespread rise, in very specific ways over the past two centuries, has been a preparation.

Charlatan: Preparation for what?

Quack: For what?
[both in quick succession]
[pause]

Indulgent: For what…?

Yogi: For the end of days.
[A scuffle and series of guffaws]

Indulgent: [After a pause] For what…?

Didactic thinker: It had been proven long ago, and without a doubt, that the minds of such as thee are nary more than a trifle.
[abrupt, lingering pause]

Yogi: Well, indeed… if minds are what count -
[guffaws and giggles, holding up of knees and laughing towards the ceiling]

Libertine: [clearing his throat] Surely not, maestro.

Yogi: Indeed it’s true, and well enough so. The mind is but a -
[his tone ascendant and pontificating]

Libertine: Trap for the unfortunate.
[silence; the yogi raises an eyebrow]

Indulgent: And well enough it is, [leaning forward and pausing, giving himself time to grin warmly at the others in succession, and enunciating with great satisfaction] that a man has but to fill his belly to know the pleasures of a king!
[guffaws and giggles, a chewing of gum and exchange of elbow nudges - friendly banter]

Didactic Thinker: [raising his head to the side with airs of inspired graces, looking off dreamily] Ah, but would that we might – that any place might have such a king that could know the joys of both mind and belly, with a knack for governing to boot.
[slamming of fists on the table, general merriment, pats on shoulders - a few too many congratulations, perhaps, through all of which the yogi, clothed in long robe, sits silent - grinning slightly, of course]

Yogi: That should come to be, should it come to be desired.

Charlatan: [quickly] Oh there’s a lot of things that should come… given the right indication.

Didactic Thinker: [with a somewhat sharp, reprimanding look, pronouncing, with authority] What it takes is a change in values. Certain things must be taken into account.

Quack: The rivers! The rivers and [with a rising fanatical tone] the way they flow!!!
[silence]

Indulgent: Anyway, a good meal could do the fix.

Charlatan: Really there are some things which one just has to understand. A mogul doesn’t look out at the land and say “It would be quite pretty [a rather foppish look on his face at the word 'pret-tee'] to have the run of the land. I should like to start here and here.” [looking quite serious] He puts his foot on the ground [stamps his foot]! He says “This is what’s what, and I’m going to have the go around!”
[a few guffaws and elbow nudges. The quack grabs the libertine's ankle; the libertine pulls away in stunned retreat]

Didactic thinker: [holding his right hand to his chin and rubbing his thumb across his lips, one end to the other] The point, if we may grant that there is one, is that, to state things clearly: it takes more than city lights to strike the darkness of humanity.
[a hush]

Indulgent: Strike? …

Libertine: Well in any event, the night is a long way ahead of us yet, [quite merrily, not quite fauxmerrily] there is much to be said and done between us, [raising his wine glass and gesturing, his brow forward] so here’s to a pleasant enough evening for us all.
[glasses raised]

Quack: Here, here.
[Glasses set down, a little noisily]

-A small dog trots across the stage with a sign sticking straight up on his back:
“ACT 2″

Quack: Right enough, fellows, right enough.

Libertine: [thistles the melody of '...sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing...' distractedly, through his teeth]

Yogi: It was unusually hot today… the season is changing. The truth, and how one feels, varies between this day and the last. Such is always the case with the season’s changes…

Didactic Thinker: Verily, verily.

Indulgent: Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a -

Quack: [eyes widening, cutting in between 'is' and 'but'] Stream! Streeem! Stream-y-ing, like fireworks, like the, like the, like… [drifts off]

Libertine: [sipping] They’re apples and oranges… days, nights, the soft fuzz in between… I watched the first commuters come up the stairs from the subway this morning, while I lay slumped, rather comfortably I’d say, against one of those stone monuments downtown. Completely different worlds converge, at that moment, a single flickering present -

Indulgent: Ah, get off it.

Libertine: – in which, [pausing] the just rising administration of the future meets the still floating minstrelsy of the past…

Yogi: And -

Didactic Thinker: But -

Yogi: Go ahead.

Didactic Thinker: But could you face that sight every morning for the rest of your life?

Libertine: I would savor it every time, like a beautiful woman, [gesticulating with three fingers to his thumb, spelling out with relish] each time as though it were the first.

Didactic Thinker: So you say…
[pouting]

Indulgent: Ay. [pause, while he peels a banana] And so says your father, and your father’s father, and by golly, your father’s father’s father too!
[general laughs. The quack pokes the libertine in the kidney. The libertine withdraws, with a not undelighted look of abashment, to the far end of the couch.]

Charlatan: The thing that needs to be decided, [nearly shouting] once and for all, is whether -
[coughing, coughing interrupts - the indulgent, hunched over forward, looks up]

Indulgent: My apologies, gentlemen. Twas the corn syrup in the caramel.
[silence; the charlatan, mouth still open, blinks and sits back in his seat]

Yogi: We are decided on one thing. There are as many approaches as there are pairs of legs walking.

Didactic Thinker: It’s a bit of a masquerade, isn’t it? A bit disquieting at times? [He stares off somewhere distantly] You think you have it all figured out, but go out on the street, and he does too, [pointing into the crowd] and so does she, and she, and he – everyone’s got it figured one way or the other, their own routine, their own shape of smile, their own clothes to stay warm in the summer, cool in the winter, I mean -

Charlatan: It’s a damn nuisance. Nobody’s whole, nobody’s… wholesome. It’s all a damn masquer -

Quack: Meep! [the libertine yawns, the indulgent finishes his banana]

Charlatan: – ade [no pause, the interpolations are subsequent with the word breaks], like you said, a grand operatic sh -

Quack: Meep. [the charlatan looks at the quack now as he continues speaking]

Charlatan: -am, [his voice rising to assert itself] it’s rudimentary and undignified everybody’s fingers in everyone else’s -

Quack: Mleeep [he's looking at the floor, as though watching and talking to a bug there]

Charlatan: – pies, will you quit that!

Indulgent: What are you looking at [said indifferently, without turning to the quack]

Didactic Thinker: Yeah say, what is that? [The libertine, yogi lean in to look] A spider? It’s got long, crusty legs.

Indulgent: Probably been mucking around in all the dust in here [still reclined, staring out above the audience]

Libertine: There’s nothing to be done for it. It settles back in as soon as you’ve swept it up [said casually].
[The yogi closes his eyes meditatively. The charlatan pushes back his shoulders, stiffening and relaxing his posture. The quack has leaned so far down as to look between his legs, underneath the couch. After a moment of silence, the didactic thinker interlocks his fingers and stretches his arms forward, cracking his knuckles. The libertine whistles aimlessly. The indulgent, who has been sipping soda, belches. The others stop what they are doing and look at him.]

Indulgent: Just my humble addition to the hot air in this room.

-A long swan wing, about six feet long, swings from the ceiling, stage right to stage left – shaped rather like a feather, but discernably a swan’s wing. It stops again at the ceiling, having made its 180? arc.

I was trying not to post on here, but I got really excited about this piece and really wanted to show it to someone.  Technically, I didn’t have anything to do with taking the x-rays (except for, you know, volunteering my mouth), but I feel like it’s within my artistic license to call this my own work of art.  I’ll probably make some drawings based on it, too, which was the original idea.  Am I the only one who thinks that x-rays of teeth are hauntingly and startlingly beautiful and fascinating?  Here are some more that I found on the internet:

1.

“I was finished with all of Russia’s Turkic South, with the ‘literature of the periphery.’  I had been to college during the last glory days of Chomskyan linguistics, when language was declared to be a biological faculty, and therefore all human languages were equally interesting–and, implicitly, so were all literatures: didn’t the very existence of Uzbek novels guarantee their inherent interestingness, like an ontological proof of God?–maybe they did, I didn’t care.”

2

“Dilorom [her Uzbek lit teacher] and I continued to exchange letters and gifts for three or four years.  ‘Respecte Elif Quisim!  I was not at all surprised to recieve your letter–because I was expecting it”, Dilorom wrote in a card, enclosed with a hardcover 1992 edition of Past Days, the novel I had vainly looked for all over Tashkent.  I think Dilorom hoped I would translate it into English, but I never made it past page two.  The phrase ‘Past Days’ stamped in white on the black cloth cover, amid red wallpaper-like arabesques–representing, I guess, the bourgeois character of historical realism–became a kind of performance, causing the the days to be past.  I dreamed about that book.  In my dreams, ‘performative’ blurbs appeared on the cover, ascribed to various Anglo-American literary critics:

Kicking this book will cause pages nineteen and twenty to stick togethere.  (In the paperback edition, the stuck pages will be fourteen and fifteen)

–F. R. Leavis

Northrop Frye has stated that, when addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, the book will clap itself over the nose of the reader’s worst enemy and remain there until the enemy has touched something which once touched a camel.

I would wake up filled with amazement and relief, understanding that I didn’t actually have to read the book: it didn’t work that way (by being read), but by being kicked, or addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, either of which was much less time-consuming than pouring through the densely typed pages, looking up every other word in the dictionary.

”

Take that, Mahabharata!

Also, for the first time ever, the category check marks on pinko’s are relevant.

The Warner came to me with clear signs; I did not retreat. I stood as Strong and grew like a palm in an oasis. The vast ocean of sand ebbed away from me but soon I grew too proud and told the other palms I would seek the desert…

The challenge of art is not to make a good thing, but to make a thing unforeseen.
It is to respect the action, to expose its independence from the ego.

We are beings of technology. We use it as a net to ensnare, a map to ingest the Other, our object.
Yet technology is moreover a method of empowering actions, and of circulating these actions, among subjects and objects indifferently.

Technology is the Other. What we seek, and what we are.

Art is a practice, to release techne from its utilitarian history, in order to engage with it in the obscure present mode.
The purpose of theory is to build a past which will allow itself to crumble away.

To say this another way:

What we mean to reproduce, we must first perfect – that is, code and construct its native architecture.  It is only with this support that we are able to see the thing as it is, objectively.  This objectivity is, however, not but the act of seeing ourselves seeing (the thing, ourselves). In other words, we construct a thing in the shape of an implied methodology.  We have not altered any thing.  We have altered ourselves and rendered ourselves incapable of any activity except nostalgia and art.  We have conformed ourselves to a language of reproduction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27Paglia.html?src=me&ref=general

The article gently hinted at a vaguely class-based or even Marxist reading of sexuality: the problem that she names lies within the current bourgeois regime, and can be seen in opposition to “Latino and African-American taste, which runs toward the healthy silhouette of the bootylicious Beyoncé,” or even “Country music, with its history in the rural South and Southwest, is still filled with blazingly raunchy scenarios, where the sexes remain dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned way.”

(it is worth noting that her perspective is clearly limited to the Western hemisphere: what are we to make of the more rigorous and codified repressions of the Islamic or Hindu worlds, where the bourgeoisie is inarguably more sexually liberated than the controlled classes?  Is this a contrast worth drawing, or does it just reinforce the us/them mentality? )

In general, as a resident of the white-middle-class that Pagalia writes about, I agree with her.  The article spoke to me loudly as a current resident of Brooklyn, where all physicality seems relegated to studio spaces where we practice yoga or capoeira or pilates.  These practices are very nice–I think I’m about to go to a new yoga studio myself in an hour or two–but what of bump and grind lasciviousness?  More personally, how have we (I) become resigned to long periods of celibacy in an urban space teeming with youth and humanity?  Of course there are personality issues involved in that, but I’m becoming more and more aware of the cultural limitations on libidinal expression in the youth culture of the city.  In my opinion, these limitations and repressions undo a lot of the progress that was made by first and second wave feminism and the sexual revolution.  To me, it feels that dating culture is too oriented toward lifelong partnerships, which makes the whole thing feel disturbingly vocational, where sexual choices are made based on notions of cultural and social status.  Which works against me, because I have yet to find my vocational place in this city (beyond my MFA program), if I am destined to have one at all.  This vocational system, as this NYtimes points out, no longer makes a gender differentiation, which is good, politically, but boring, libidinally.  I am happy with and proud of my limited masculinity, but I feel that my masculinity has almost no role to play in my life, more so because of my slight build and small stature.   I feel emasculated.  This feels so good to say that it might be important.

(later on, I’m going to cross-post a version of this post on my blog at www.jedicist.org/blog  I’m newly resolved to use that venue more for self-analysis and expression, and a catalog for constant writing, more blog than public notebook, which is what it has been in the past)

Jed, I think I showed you this poem junior year, when I wrote it — it’s about the same thing you’re writing about, and I thought it might be worthwhile to share it again.  Well, maybe not exactly the same thing, but inspired by the same events.  I think it’s worth noting that I was severely mentally unstable when I wrote this.  I think it’s so much more interesting than anything I’ve written lately, though.  I want to get back to writing the kind of stuff I wrote when I was sick.  The question is, how do you harness the power of mental illness while maintaining a healthy and functional lifestyle?  It really bothers me that it’s double-spaced, by the way, it’s supposed to be single-spaced.  Also, certain lines are supposed to be indented to varying degrees, but the site keeps setting them back to the margin.  Sturgeon, what’s up with that? (Never mind, I just realized I can post the word document.  Look at that for format.)

–

Can’t keep

grinds in the grinder or in the canoe  Lets free

an orchid fire on the swing of things and

if left unattended  mixes up Keats with

Yeats

Said  Keep the mop top post bag   the ding-

eroo   in the canoe

Keep it

at the light hole or the light’ll just roll  On the piss pot where I

will not unless you won’t

Said  See that mountain pass straight west the uptake

indicator-see the grinds out

Is in for a

tracheotomy of sorts  A

peddler

in the almond bush is poised

Flashlight in the back room  Pittance in the oven  Chow mein’s

got a heart murmur nothing scary

I heard the crinkling in the dog’s secret

part  I went in

To get my lungs sewn to the mattress I had to stand on a box

to get to the mattress  Technician purred sweet pumpkin they’d

never come loose  Litter in the nook like tongs all this time

our snow’s been straight

subliming

aren’t you going to breaststroke the lap  Well aren’t you  Aren’t

Isn’t that the officer

Looking at this one now, I realize that it looks kind of sexual, which it wasn’t meant to be in the least.

I’m often rely too much on high contrast, so I was trying to see what I could do with low contrast.

Sketch of excavated artifacts and plaster cast from Pompeii.

I had a weird obsession with drawing abstractions of chests of drawers and jewelry boxes for a few months.  I did some silkscreen prints of them, too.

Owl With No Beak.  At first the fact that it had no beak was a mistake — I was working from a photograph, and I was so absorbed in looking at the shapes of the lights and darks that I wasn’t even thinking about what they represented.  Apparently, I got the darks in the area near where the beak should be wrong, and it didn’t occur to me until after I had finished it that there should be a beak there.  Then I never went back to fix it.  I kind of like it this way, actually.  It’s kind of surreal.

Meanwhile, the southern coast is going to be a slimy wasteland for the rest of our American lives due to the incompetence of capitalism.

It’s too late in the day; the process is now unstoppable, the descent is entrenched; it stills my hands over the keyboard and drives me outward into the sunshine.

I would avoid specifics, as well as reactive language (i.e. all use of the words Morality, Religion, Tradition, Patriotism) Or rather, I might in one sentence associate these with ‘metaphor,’ but without any hint of irony or otherwise liberal snobism.  This would effectively be a defense of ‘metonymy’ as such, but merely as something implicitly condemned by invasive forms, both overt and unconscious, of hegemonic exclusivity. I might try to trace how metaphor and metonymy involve different methods of identifying oneself with reality.  Lived metaphorically, identity is formed through allegiance or ‘bonding’ with a close set of familiar people, places, and things to which one returns, for most of one’s life, for pleasure and a sense of fulfillment.  Metonymic identity is more a matter of catching oneself up in objective flows of desire (the desire to watch this type of movie, the desire to hear that type of music, the desire to gain this and now that sense of fulfillment).  What is the aim here?  To ‘know what it is’ to desire that way?  To gain some ‘metaphysical’ or ‘transhistorical’ sense of a desire-flow’s genealogical presence?  Metonymy treats time as a game in which the permutation of its segments is experienced as more intensely desirable than that the success of these segments be known in advance.  But I would like to avoid saying these things, and focus on the difference between metonymy of the One and metonymy of the Other — because there is no point in setting metonymy above metaphor, or metaphor above metonymy. Both sides will always tend to justify themselves.  Moreover, everyone lives in both ‘manors.’  Simply to describe them, and then to make metonymical alternativity understandable in a theory that a layman could understand, would be the aim… such that a reader might be urged to become aware of his habits and choices in a way proactive to the expression of her (pre)individual desiring-subjectivity.