Phrenology101

A lot of stuff about nothing of particular interest.

Fragment of a Journal Entry (Dec. 15/04)

This cannot go on, this deracination. Not long ago, so it seems, I started work on a play, a word-horror, depicting the cooking and eating of Dylan Thomas’ liver, of all things: his besotted organ-grinded into some gormandized aforethought (lessness). I suppose at that time, given the vagaries of my own life, I felt the need to digress into the diseased ‘otherness’ of someone other than myself; a self, I must confess, that was diseased and less than. An obituary of sorts, perhaps in forethought, that is in fact what it was, this aberration of the God-given’s of a life wasted to alcoholic. An assonance (that is a better way of seeing it) where the words never find rhythm or self-mastery. But there is no such thing as a phantom called God, so these vagaries were perhaps not what they seemed. Perhaps this is when the deracinations started. I have only memory to rely on, which at best, so I’ve come to learn, is a whorishness that tricks and eludes one into seeking forgiveness for imaginary sins.
I am inconsolable. Aging not like a delicate wine, a blood-richness best savored in a mouth sullied with Joycean décolleté, or a strong cheese, but like some incontinent old man arching towards the half century; Icarian wings flailing madly, embossed with a Cartesian tallowness impossible to shrug off.
Philosophy, as such, has been the ruin of my life. It sodomizes the simple verities of ‘things’ with such violent imprecation (deconstructing the indestructible) denying it the innocence and joyousness of meaningful engagement. We are no longer agents in the world, but rather the creators of an otherness that is so unwavering in its insistence that nothing is as it appears, but that ‘this’ or ‘that’, or rather ‘not this’ or ‘not that’ is all that is the case. Everything, the simplicities of all things, is damaged beyond recognition. A simple engagement has been destroyed, and in its place a battleground whored in the idiocies of academia has been constructed (or rather deconstructed) with the skillfulness of an abattoir (ist’s) indelicate hands. This slaughterhouse mentality (if mentality it is) has left us with a carrion of thought, messy and entrailed with no-nothingness. Dylan Thomas’ whisky-ragged liver seems palatable in comparison to such intellectual buffoonery and cleverness. No longer engaged with the majesty and simplicity of ‘it all’, but whoring our way through a self-deprecating (unacceptable and fearfully obvious) intellectual pathology sullied with false ideologies and blind Oedipal fearlessness.
Leibniz tries to seduce us into believing that we inhabit the ‘best of all possible worlds’, engaged as we are in a mismatching of experiential realities with mathematical sterility. He was no fool, but a mathematician plagued with a philosopher’s dialectic for rhetorical precariousness, the thinking person’s maelstrom that leaves the uninitiated bed-ridden with indecision. I myself prefer the Spinozan one-substance catchall, a monotheism that is much more capable of deconstructing itself without attributing algebraic logarithms to a simple metaphilosophical sodomy. With an eloquence that only Deleuze (perhaps Joyce) could master, much present-day philosophizing is done on the back of monsters, ass-fucking the canon into a sycophantic lethargy that leaves little room for commonsensical digressions.
If only Bataille was alive to see the mess we’ve made of things in such short time. In his seminal (semenal) parchment Story of the Eye, we are encouraged to be voyeurs to a most archaic animalism, one that not only introduces us to the carefree regality of the sodomite, but to the painless excitement of a sensuality run riot. Who but Bataille could leave us begging for more when the Catholic priest is buggered and cast into a purgatorial no-nothingness? Joyce, perhaps, sloshing about in the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea poking at the dogsbody with an ashplant scummed clean with lemon-scented soap. Its no chance of happenstance, that the young Stephen’s surname is Dedalus. Those madly flailing wings snotted with the youthful cynicism of hypocrisy. Then of course, while we’re on the topic of ass-fucking the monster, there is Aldo Busi’s Sodomies in Eleven Point, a novel that realigned us with the caustic realities of anal moroseness. It must have something to do with the Algerian air or the Italian predisposition for sinful misdemeanors. Nonetheless, the bastard child that is postmodernism was fucked from the ass of Enlightenment rendered sterile by the capriciousness of a pusillanimous otherness. Thank the one-substance unmoved mover for that! A jawing mouthful of Dylanesque liver would do me fine right about now. Onions boiled into a placental mush, skin-peels, like lice-bodies, caressing the soft nethermostness of my mouth mouthness. Ah what joyousness unimaginable.
This being the first day of entries, I feel a weighing upon myself encouraging me to move outward with as little painfulness as possible; not humanly, but rather with an animal’s stealth and loathsomeness, forever riding the cresting wave of stupid no-nothing (ism). Animal mentality (such as it is): phylum, genus, whatever you may have, leaves me little room for swift outer-maneuvering; and I will, no doubt, find myself supping on the rooted scallions and ear-joints of silly, little euphemistic inanities. Prohibitive, no nothing more nor less. The Oedipal eye (I) forming syllabic assonance’s in the scrotumtightening sea of my assenting thoughts (lessness). Fucking time-wasted in the prattles and dregs of it all. If I hadn’t listened to those Gregorian chanting Castrate some twenty years ago, I might not find myself in the predicament I find myself in today. Afterthoughts are certainly scrotumtightening in retrospection.
(Dec16. 04)
Sleeping is no longer a habit; it has become, sadly enough, optional. Unlike the smoking of tobacco, which is habitual and thereafter less of an option but an addiction, with the same ferocity as heroin, sleeping has become a troublesome existential problem. Why existential and not, you may ask, ontological? Because ontology is for foolish men with incontinent thoughts and childish inefficiencies. Always caught, so it seems, in the scullery of the haberdasheries seamless trouser-bottom, frayed and tattered, tormented into a disconsolate otherness that begs no resolution, but ekes out a meager existence in this, ‘the best of all possible worlds’. As with the arrival of the cold, tundra permafrost that aches the toe-tips and heel-cusps of my sorry unshod feet, my thumb ends are splitting and painfully soar. It is the result, so it seems, of smoking without the armory of gloves or wooly mittens in the deadness of the winter solstice. Nicotine is more important that skin-tips, so it seems. An arguably stupid and self-defeating attitude postured and habituated by a fair to middling fool. Without the ear-crookedness of Beckett, where words are not simple pleasures, but painful surgeries, I have no notion where I would be. Dead and rotting, perhaps. Or riding a tin bicycle with schizophrenic urgency. Peddle faster you moron, before your tubing goes flat and airless (the two, the air and the flatness, being synonymous, of course. But why bother with inequities and shared vocabularies? They cause nothing but strain and incommunicability.)
The sun, so it seems, has freed itself of the night’s sodomies and is rising meekly on a gray, matted skyscape. A sky pitted and dredged with indecision and snotgreenseaness. Could one have a shit-bag appended to one’s shoulders, a catchall for the shit and pissiness that seems to forever arrogate an otherwise clear and present mind? I, my oedipal eye, has gotten the best of me again, sadly enough. No not sadly, never that, but more indelicately, like a screwdriver in the eye or a thumbnail in the orbital whatever the fuck it is. This oedipal strangulation, the triptych of unreasonableness, has a neck-garroting hold on my fragile ego (lessness) once again, as endless and ineluctable as ever.

"…poetry, after all, always draws upon the language of one’s childhood."
Czeslaw Milosz.