BECKDEGGER, S, M

Waiting for Heidegger

(Jan 31/06)
Who are Molloy and Murphy, Mercier and Camier, Watt and Crapp, Vladimir and Estragon? Where are they, how come ‘are they’? The eight, the literary eight, are Heideggerian characters, non-characters, phantoms and ghostbodies, names without names, the nameless. M.M.M.C.W.C.V and E are in the world, yet not in the world, they a worldless, always on the edge of a world, a character, a name. Beckett’s characters are no-body’s, specters, fragmentation’s of a splintered self, or ego-self, an ego-barrenness, a non-ego, an ego yet to be. Had Bion had more time and Beckett less genius, M.M.M.C.W.C.V and E would cease to exist, have existed, been characterless, non-characters, Heideggerian no-men. The eight are never quite ‘in the world’, but on the outskirts, pushing into the trope of the world, the moment, the characters they are suppose to be, but will never become, be. Beckett’s characters are Heideggerian no-men, characters yet to throw themselves into the word, the moment, the character. As such, they are characterless, mere ghostbodies, apparitions, shades without umbrellas. Beckett’s characters have yet to see, or recognize themselves in, the Lacanian mirror; they stare at the silver backing of the mirror, not into the mirror itself. They have no reference, no identity other than a blank, silver impression, a no-man.

Act one ends:
Estragon: Well, shall we go?

Vladimir: Yes, let's go.

(They do not move.)

Act two ends:

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let's go.

(They do not move.)

E: Let's go.
V: We can't.
E: Why not?
V: We're waiting for Godot
V: Moron!
E: Vermin!
V: Abortion!
E: Morpion!
V: Sewer-rat!
E: Curate!
V: Cretin!
E: (with finality) Crritic!
V: Oh!

(He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.)

Vladimir and Estragon are never quite in-the-world, but on the periphery, the edge, the outside (in) of the world. In and out at the same time, simultaneously, yet neither one nor the other, a no-men’s land, a blank Lacanian slate, the Heideggerian ontological misstep. The Heideggerain circle has neither a beginning nor an end (Derrida showed us that) but an infinite number, or juncture, of jumping-in point(s): ontological hopscotch. A being-there, a being-amidst, a being-with, a being-in, a being-in-the-world, a coping-in-being-in-the-world, Being-out, never in. Moron! Vermin! Abortion! Morpion! Sewer-rat! Curate! Cretin! Critic! Oh!

tHE hEADaCHES cONTINUE

Word and Text

(Jan 30/06)
The mind, the mind’s eye, creates, or rather recreates, the written word, the word(s) on the page, or screen or template. Perhaps not recreate, but create for the first time, the one and only time, the time of the reading of the written word on the page or screen or template. A template can be whatever one wishes, a page, a leaf, a computer screen, a blank slate, a tabala rasa. The words, their meanings and connections to us, the reader, are there long before the ink, or laser, scribes them onto the page, the screen or the template. They exist independent of their being there, anywhere, on page, screen or template. The eye, the mind’s eye, brings with it, carries in the satchel of it’s ‘this’, whatever is to be transcribed, brought to or into the written word(s) on the page, the screen or the template. Nothing exists, nothing is there on the page, nothing but what we, the mind’s eye, bring to the page, the word, the text, the screen image or template. Unconscious wishes and fantasies transcribed for the first, second, millionth time onto the page, the blank page, template or screen, rebuses from the previous day, week, hundred years. Images, both faint and aglow, of things and events and past memories and traumas, happy times, sad times, times that have yet to be or will be.

The written word, the text, does not exist outside the transcription of the word(s), the words and text into the ‘this’, the ‘this is me’, the mind’s eye. Each reading, each new reading, is the first, the one reading, the only reading. In this manner there is no division, no difference between deconstruction and reconstruction, they are one side of the same coin, a one-dimensional coin, a flat tropism, a singularity of text, word, meaning and reading, the ‘what is read’. Each word, sentence, hieroglyphic, trope, meaning, inscription, are the first, the one, the first reading, meaning, trope, the word as whiteness and plane. There is no difference between the whiteness of the page, or screen, or template, and the word inscribed, or brought to, carried into, the whiteness, the wordless plane. As suggested in a previous posting, there is no present, a now, an ‘in the moment’, but only a past, a ‘was once’, a future projected from the lamp of the past, projected onto the blank whiteness of the screen, the text, the word, the first word(s). The future in the past tense, the moment, the now, the present, a lacuna, a blank white page yet to be filled, yet to be transcribed from memory.

iLLOGICAl pOSITIVISm

My Left Toe

(Jan 30/06)
I’m dying. Of something, of something that seems to have started in my foot, my left foot, my Christie Brown left foot. Though I aspire not to scribble and sketch with my foot, or feet, I do see no way out of it, out of having but one foot. It’s in the middle toe, no, the toe closest to the big toe, the second toe from the big toe, the fourth from the small toe, toe. Whichever which, it’s there, beside, abutting another toe, a digit, an ambulatory phalange. I often wonder, now that he’s dead, if Derrida had foot problems, problems with his toe or toes. It would have been rude and unseemly to have had such thoughts when he was alive, breathing, deconstructing, dodging Cambridge bullets, salvo upon salvo, illogical invidious bullets. No rest for the intellectually meek and impossibly tedious, the Wittgenstein envied and Moore half-cocked and waddled. Wittgenstein aborted his tractatus more than once, thrice, perhaps, sitting bowlegged in a Norwegian shack cooking celery heads and mutton hafts in a big roily pot. Figured out how to engineer a train, a flying machine, and sow a garden without bending the ribbon of his back. Quite the unordinary fellow, school mom and calculus savant, wee blond downed Norse wee ones learning algebra, fractions and logarithms from scratch and rote. I need both of my feet, not one-arched and gamy, but two-footed and carefree of gait and canter. There is an afghan of fresh new snow on the mantel, the rodeo-way and asphalt, the one-way, other-way go that way not that way, roadway the other way, way. It has been snowing, a lot, a lot of snowed snow has snowed, an afghan of it, a fresh throw of new snow, snow. With luck and no little alchemy, I will not die, soon, right away, tonight or into the morn, the snowy, fresh new snow snowed morn, morning. I will elevate, elevate above sea level, level, elevated on a pillow, a cushion, perhaps, my toe, the left one, toe, the one next to the big toe, and fourth from the littler toe, toe. The undertow toe, the one that will spell the end, the final demise of me, me and not me, invidious me, me.

DERRIDA'S dOG

The Reading of

(Jan 28/06)
She sat, sitting, with her legs tucked into the hove of her shirts, corduroy, camel’s skin, some unidentifiable cotton serge, bought, most likely, at Zellers or Miracle Mart. A bevel, an edginess, that demanded attention. An anticipation that the Torah might be read, deconstructed, transubstantiated, retextualized, then signed by the messianic hand of reason. Acumen, perspicuity, an oblique anxiety, tome-mercantilism, sullying the horsehair cushion cushioning the cumber in the hollow bone-work of the buttocks. A coffee-tableau, architectonics, macramé, savant stitching and quiltwork. Waiting for the soothsayer to proffer a polite answer to question: question and answer, interpersonal depersonalization. Something’s should not be deconstruction, the mouth, the ear, the flocculent awl of the labrum. Best to leave some things as they are, or are wont to be are.

We, all of us, learned to make paper from scratch, with wet papyrus and cork-reed, and an offset-press that smoothed the paper to a fine sheet of writer’s mead. Not balled-up newsprint bartered and haggled for behind the Cantors, or in the back alleyway of the Steinberg’s, where one can purchase, at wholesale, bagel-thins and pumpernickel melbas. The creamery cheese, of course, is retail. We, all of us, saw the poster in the front window of the Cantor’s Bakery proclaiming, ‘You don’t have to be orthodox to eat bagels’, which to us, and perhaps we alone, meant Winnebegos. Seldom do I read what is fashionable, first person’s written in a schoolgirl’s vernacular, all that pubescent angst, caponized cocks, nervous ticking, youthful travelogues. I’d rather be interned, mortared, in Dante’s hell, eyes frozen wide open, Dis picking at my oculus’, than read about what you did, or didn’t do, on your summer vacation in Greece, or hell, for that matter.

PLATO'S FLASHLIGHT

My Life Living Lived

(Jan 27/06)
I have no beginning or ending, nor a present or future. I am somewhere in the middle, a life lived and yet to be lived. I have neither a conscious nor a mid-conscious, nor have I a post-conscious or a conscious conscious. I have what I refer to as a contra-consciousness; a battleground where my life living, lived and yet to be lived, acts out its mercenary impersonation of life. Puppetry without the stooge, the unmoved mover moving and manipulating the strings that represent the socialization of an individual life lived, living and yet to be either or. In this manner I can never be sure if what I believe to be living is in fact lived, or what is lived is in the process of living, or vice versa. All I know for certain, if anything at all, is that I have no living, no moment of life living or lived. As you can well imagine, this creates its own inherent problems, a battleground of infinite possibilities, a conflict between disparate lives lived, living and yet to be lived, or a life lived at all. Should this be the case, I have neither a life, a living, a life lived, or a living life, or a living or yet to be lived life.

Again, the permutations, computations, and possibilities are seemingly infinite and subject to change, infinite and incalculable as they are, or as they appear to be. Poetry is much simpler, and infinitely less ontologically cumbersome. As I have no idea whether I sleep well when I sleep, as I would either be asleep, which I would be unaware of, or dreaming that I am, as it were, asleep, the query as to whether I slept or have or will sleep well seems moot at best. Throwing caution to the wind, I will sleep regardless of the inherent difficulties in determining whether I am, will be, or have slept at all. As I said at the beginning of this teleological quandary, it really matters little what I think, think I think, or whether I think at all. It’s all moot conjecture, middle with no beginning, no ending, no consciousness or post-consciousness, just puppetry and cunning stoogery.

I hAVE A hEADaCHE mAYBE

Nothing Else, Nothing

(Jan 26/06)
I am the excrescence that fills the void, the syphilitic ulcer that skirls the skin of your lips, the gonorrheal wetness at the back of your throat, the skimpily dressed debauchee with the machicolate smirk and wee misshapen feet. Why are you like that? She said, so crudely indifferent to feelings, people’s feelings? I’d rather, I’d much rather worry about upsetting an animal, I said, a beast, than a people. People heal, beasts don’t. You’re an imbecile, she said, her lip curled around the chisel of her teeth, whiter than free-base and bed sheets. I know, I said, that I know, perhaps nothing else but that. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held my breath, her breath, hers that she held, not mine, pitted with a soft almost imperceptible wail. I murmured something, something lilting, into the conch of her ear, her ear, not mine, and closed my eyes. Life’s a waste of time and time is a waste of life, I said, nothing more. I said nothing, nothing more. That means nothing, she said, her waist clabbered in the shank of my arms, my fingers, not hers, but mine, tightening, cinching in around the manse of her hips. Fecal nonsense, she said, and not very good at that.

I loosened my fingers around the camber of her waist, not mine, but hers, and opened then closed my eyes, once, then a second time, then none. What if I were to pickaxe my eyes, these, I said, pointing at my eyes, not hers, mine, and be done with it? Like Oedipus, the bad and mealy son. Would that make you happy, change things, as they are, make things more, better than? I opened then closed my eyes, her eyes, not mine, remaining open, not shut, all the while, for the while, while I closed and reopened mine. Maybe, she said. Maybe it would, it would and wouldn’t hurt, couldn’t hurt, would it? Now you see, I said, if you were an animal, some beast, I would pay you more respect, care more, at all, for you feelings. As it stands, I could care less, less than more than less. I hate you and your, you and… I kissed her softly, with a passion broaching on madness, on the cant of her head, where the front of the head meets with the eyebrows, and whispered, softly whispered, I know, yes, I know. That I know, perhaps that, but nothing else.

META-oNToLoGY

No Subject

(Jan26/06)
Or…

I have neither feelings
or thoughts
nor have I intuitions
Or memories

I have neither emotions
or intellect
nor have I a meaning
Or a purpose

Nor have I memories
or thoughts
nor purpose of thought
Or meaning

Nor intellect of self
or a thought of
nor purpose of meaning
Or-----

tHE uNHOLY tRINITY

Gangsters and Bedouins

(Jan 24/06)
My favorite authors are seditious, gangsters and Bedouin’s, word-sodomites and troublemakers. One need look no further in the alphabet than the G’s to find the trinity of bad guy writers: Gide, Genet and Goytisolo. These three are the gunmen of the twentieth century, the literary bandits of an immense and unyielding literary hostage taking. They three-handedly took the canon by the scroll box and rendered it sterile, snipping away at the prepuce with such semantic dexterity, that all that was left when they were through was a horribly circumcised monster child. Gide with his ferocious need to be heard and accounted for, his never strait and narrow attach on convention and post-Victorian prudence. Genet’s uncanny ability to render the acute obscure, the politically correct subversive. And Goytisolo, the only remaining belletristic-sodomite, who felt it his duty to cannibalize and eviscerate the pendants and monotheists who had all but taken over literary license.

To these three, the unholy trinity of literary-sodomy, I prostrate myself in awe and supplication. (Though prostate might be a more aptly word). To those of us who will never savor the ontological virility of the sodomite, or the non-Platonic love of one man for another, Gide and Genet and Goytisolo have gifted us with the Kantian duty of the writer at war: the gangster and the Bedouin, the troublemaker and the bandit, the caponizer and the hostage taker, the circumciser and the canonical sodomite. My favorite authors are risk takers, ideological terrorists, writers who truly believe that sexual, racial, gender, social, political, and more so, ontological freedoms, are human rights, not theodic capitalist privileges.

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION to mETApHYSICs

Phantoms and Ghostbodies

(Jan 24/06)
A metaphysical world is a world of spooks and revenants. A metaphysical realm is a realm of false-judgments and inhume-notions. A metaphysical reality is a reality of inane stupidities and sophistic knavery. A metaphysical world doesn’t have a collarbone or a hip joint, nor can it balance a checkbook or breastfeed a colic baby. A world construed of phantoms and ghostbodies is a world lacking in temper, tone and originality. A metaphysician is a double-crosser and a second-story man. A metaphysician is a make-believer and a horse-thief. A metaphysical world is a world of imagination and fiction.

A metaphysical reality is an irreality, a paper-mashie mockup of a real-reality. All metaphysics is trickery and chicanery, false-judgments and inhume-notions, inane stupidities and sophistic knavery’s. All metaphysicians are dupes and profiteers, charlatans and mountebanks, false-lucre’s and glad-raggers. Spooks and revenants don’t have toes or opposable thumbs, nor do they have substantive ideas or notions, beliefs or perceptions, original thoughts or collarbones. As I can’t balance a checkbook to save my life, it stands to reason that I, too, am a second-story man, a charlatan, a mountebank, and worst of all, a metaphysician.

pSYCHOsEMANTiCs

Pedagogical Incontinence

(Jan 22/06)
Other than Friedrich, A.C. T.C. T.D. N, few people speak in a language I understand, or care to. The pepsinate of ‘depth psychology’ (the lacerate of metaphysical hooliganism) a fearful yet fearless man, staring into the charnel-abyss, the slaughterhouse of self-reflection, and seeing beyond the simulacra, deep into the id-eulogy, the irreverence of self, with no chance for redemption or Kantian reification. Tom Waits is a Nietzsche, a mountain climber and a tightrope walker. There is really no one else, no one worth the bother of comparison. Said, I wouldn’t want to belong to an organization that had me as a member, good-standing or not. Better yet, I wouldn’t want to look into the abyss without seeing myself reflected back. The abyss is self (perhaps –less) and self is the abyss, the abyssal-self with an eye for imperfection and contra-sodomy. By this make reference to the reification of pedagogical sodomy, the ass-fuck that puts an end to, or a stopper in, or a way out of, Wittgenstein’s fly-bottle.

A Deleuzian a posteriori assault, a good hard penetrating graze up between the cleave of the ass, a prostate apostate, a forced and ungentle incontinence. If only, just if only if only just this one time, time immoral and decanting. For what is morality but a means of currency for the rich and immoral, the concupiscent and pusillanimous, the cunt-weary and culturally backward. Foucault was onto it long before it was fashionable to be so, but sadly enough the dispirited Gomorrah died before we took him seriously. Now we pay the price, a costly and most timely one at that. The more capitalism presses forward, the further backward culture falls. Read your Heidegger you pedagogical sulks, before technology becomes culture, all that’s left of Shakespeare, Joyce, Alighieri, M. de C. Saavedra, Mozart (of course), Bach, Ludwig et al. Sorry sad state of affairs indeed, and getting sorrier by the minute, yes indeed, yes, I said yes, yes…

cRITIQUE Of iMPURE rEASON

Sativa Medico

(Jan 21/06)
I should be working on a report on Medico Marijuana that I have been ask to clean up and reproof, but instead I’m listening to a dinner party for Mozart, a repressive childhood trauma gone bad, a viola without catgut and horse mane. From the slattern-blown pane of my bedroom window, I face a tonsure bare maple splotched and weighedlow with late January flurry. Sativa desiccate, Doritos tapered to fit nicely in the bolt of a drool-proof mouth. Mozart’s Requiem begs a well-rolled fatty tamped with a stogie filter.

I’d give the methadone maintenance a go, except for one wee problem. I’m not, nor have I ever been, no wee heron addict. Never done the stuff, truth be no one. Fact is, I don’t ever know what the shit looks like, and me claiming to be a fucking adduction cowslip and all. Never once ever even seen the stuff, in a picture or a snap or on the TV, but beyond that, never with my own eyes, spectacled or not. Give me a Dad’s or a gingersnap any day of the week, even on a chiming Sunday, biscuits not being one of my strong suits, nor much to my liking.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. FN.

All births are tragic, even breaches and c-sections. The grandee natal expectoration, spit out from between angry, bitter thighbones, and that ungodly slather betwixt Monad Venus and parturition hole, not a weeping eye in the house, not one. Doctor, doctor ladling the speculum up into the warren, fishing around for an arm or a collarbone. Just my luck, he hooks me round the scrotal-sac, and yanks me out through the rectory door, my expiration date stamped on the auld of my funnel coned head. Birth’s tragic, yes indeed, and so is the afterthought, the slow trundle to death. Live whiles you got the chance, cause tomorrow could very well be the first day of the beginning of the end. The final exit, yes indeed, thanks to Jean-Paul and the other post-structural miscreants. Hang on tight, the ships lost its keel, follow the rats, they’re the only ones that know up from down, port for stern, ass from teakettle, yes indeed, yes…

MINUS-LESSTHAN

Auricular Adagio

(Jan 21/06)
I am faint of hearing, a hardening of the staples in the innermost trench of the ear canal. Hard tectonic bone, calcified and milky-white, a petrified boneyard in the auricular channel. My new hearing aid is one of those wraparound behind the ear models, pressing increasingly into the tuckbone articulating the soft tissue of my head. A persistent whirring and tremendousness that increases with stress and fatigue. No big deal about the little shit Mozart; never did think much of the spinneret-savant. Much prefer Bach or Ludwig, Gounod’s Faust or Dvorak’s symphony no.7 in D minor, a Liszt’s allegro or quasi adagio, some of Handel’s watermusic or some spicy Gregorian Chant, Gregorianischer Choral, perhaps, Schubert in B minor, andante, allegro ma non troppo, but none of that Wolfgangbang Amadeus trilling bullroar. Perhaps if I could gage my hearing loss to Mozart’s concertos or that cadaverously boring requiem, attenuate it to deafen-out fluffy mordant pipsqueakiness, flatulent savant-prodigy. I suppose deafness can be a benison in disguise. 250 years of sychophantic psychosis.

iNFORMAL bLOGIC

Mahler's Fifth

(Jan 20/06)
Mid-March and Eliot’s still at it, make a fucking mess and tatter of things, whittling away at life, dental hygiene and millstones, fucking nonsense, and a blade’s blue-booker to boot and Mahler. Ginsoaked, no less, fucking scribe’s cramp, not an opposable thumb in the joining. And Mahler’s Fifth coaxing patricidal thoughts from the skittle of my thinking. Hat or no hat, the eye gouging is the same, Blackguards and Hoodoos, and pretty scullery hires in opposable rows. Addle-minded flossy, denticulate and bevel-edged. Not one to mince and monger with, nor harrow and bark. TBS. and marrow, terra firma split in cress’, a noman’sland of kurtosis’ and bear-bearded fellows, and some chivvy-shouldered chap with gugalug and the croup. Fucking sad state of affairs indeed, indeed. Saw Mahler’s Filth at the NACHO some time long gone and go, a slurry of shirttails and buttresses wane with triple sec and melba. Fosters the impression that the rich are imbecilic and prone to sashaying in neatly parried shoats. Sidestepping social conscience and alms providing. Hats off to the Viceroy, or Vicars’ melba, Christ’s skin scalloped with potables and tannic hooch. Spoils the tongue with cracker salt and rectory crumbs. Gods know what makes a stale biscuit a transubstantive treat, all that mollycoddling and goodly manners. Stephen Deadatlast, poking the afflictive dogsbody with a well-appointed stick, ashplant, for the merry of foot and poor dead Patty’s gravepost. Poor Stephen’s recently dead and deceased mother, rheumy and godsawful in bare patched gravescothes and harlot’s pin. Makes one what to bark and swisher with the likes of Blazes and Patty’s poor widowed widow. Nothing fixes up a bad day like a little of the in and out and porcine mummeries spewing mouthfuls of lactose intolerance. Gugalug, and so forth. That’ll be quite enough of that blather and rue, best left to those with ample thyme and a garland of marigolds and rosehip, or a gumming of no-salts and ampersands @.

JOYKETT, S. J

Blazes Boylan’s Gobspit

(Jan 19/06)
You are a bogeyman, a mountblanche, a scrofulous fuck. I, however, am the beauty that beholds the eye, the confectionery sugar that sullies the pads of your tongue, the eyelash that you brush away from the fop of your trousers. I am l’ amour oral, the teeth beveling the manse of your thoughts, the shift in perspective from hygiene to soiling. You are a Freudian night-terror, an intractable pathology, a STD that can neither be stayed nor rescinded; a viral spirochete, head bullying thighs, mons and parturition hole. I am Molly’s defiled Bloomers, Blazes Boylan’s gobspit slathering the cleave between a whorish thigh. I am lemony-scented soap, lurched in pocket ruffs trove with lint and candy wrappings. I am a postcard from ‘what’s-her name’, that bog-land slut with Dublin’s dirt in the squirrel of her treeing. You, whomever, are tonsure bare, blunt-cut and stained through with night-wetting and bucking soars.

crows’ murder

hair black
a murder of crows

the sway of hips
moving inward

then out

echoing the suckle
of her mouth

my legs

numb and unresponsive
to touch

and tongue

and crows feathers
moving inward

then out

Robin’s egg-blue, nature, nurture, pollute, corrupt, soil, profane, infinitude, destitute, refute, confute, salute, rebuke, collate, reprobate, allocate, falsify, dolomite, hard Etruscan bone, white, whiter, whitest, pale-white, junk-worry white, whitest white, whiter. And tongue balanced lolling in the chance of her mouth, sullying saltlick-cowing cud and grassland muddy with Dublin dirt and tenor’s railhead siring poor mad-footed Lucia dancing madly, mad. Patchy-eyed ginstone, hiking trousers to knee and ankle and foot and arch, mollycoddling commode wiping ass with Sears and Roebucks and Atlantis Monthly. Joyless’ eyesore, river runs round pound, errata, drowsing never to awaken to quillwort, barnacle and tackman’s stub.

CONSCIOUSNESS un-EXPLAINED (profaned)

Meaningless Drivel

(Jan 15/06)
Saying that I only know (when) or (while) I’m unconscious when I’m conscious, is like saying I only know white when it’s black, or understand English when it’s spoken in Italian. Being unconscious is never unconscious, or being unconscious of being unconscious, but conscious of being conscious that I was unconscious, which tells us nothing whatsoever. Unconsciousness is an interpretation fixed by consciousness, a conscious interpretation of a supposed unconscious state, or non-conscious state that we suppose we had, or that we can interpret or extrapolate from consciousness.

In this manner, we never know for certain if we were, in fact, unconscious, but can only suppose from a conscious stance that we may have been, at one time or the other, in this state we refer to as unconscious. This non-conscious state we refer to as unconscious, is, in actuality, an interpretation, or a stance, that we refer to or interpret from a conscious state, nothing more. If this is so, which I suppose it is, then black is white and English is Italian if the two binary opposites depend on one another for they’re stance, or definition, or being things or stances or definitions or words or things at all.

Opposition fields meaning, and meaning is drawn from interpretation, which, in turn, is fielded from something posit against something else, a binary, or oppositional other, or other-ness. For all I know I could be unconscious yet never know it, or be conscious yet never really know whether what I take for consciousness is unconsciousness, or an interpretation of unconsciousness drawn from consciousness, or vice versa. In this manner, and bowing irreverently to the Socratic dialogue, I know nothing more than knowing that I know very little at all, and that, in and of itself, I can never be certain of. Sometime ago I wrote (under the influence of pedagogical one-up-man-ship) that philosophy was the ruin and bane of my life, I stand by that statement, and never once have I faltered or looked for a way out of Wittgenstein’s fly-bottle.

THE SODOMITE and the DECONSTRUCTIONist

Count Juan

(Jan 13/06)
Your Kef pipe, Mr. Goytisolo, is viscid and tacky with resin, from the leaf, or the pod, or the stamen, or perhaps from the piddle on the mosque of your lips. Had you met Michel, no doubt the kef smoke and sodomies would have been flying, like fucking ninety, perhaps a hundred, perhaps more. In the scholars barrio, or a too-hot bathhouse, rocksalt and myrrh stiffening the angle of your mans’-laughter. Contagion’s all round, keep a starched upper lip, blood-borne and angled just right, pineal to prostate, cud-chew to tailbone. The philosophy of the sodomite, the effervescent aftertaste of mothballs and lubricious jellies, like fucking ninety, breakneck fucking fast, maybe faster yet. Taking that Deleuzian maxim to the frontier: ass-fucking the philosophical monster, giving birth to the post-postmodern bastard monster-child. Kef up the good work, you deserve it.

Before you try your hand at deconstruction, you first need to have mastered the drawing of the hand, the fingers, angles, skin casings and shoals, then, and only then, you are ready to destroy and rebuild, or reconstruct. The deconstructor is a first and foremost a constructor, a conductor, a master of primal imagery. All artists worth their weight in saltpeter, Bacon, Riopelle, Bosch, Bruegel, Schiele, even Caravaggio deloused of conceit and bad manners, mastered the hand before shattering it with the hammer of deconstruction. Derrida wrote an exegesis on geometry and formal logic long before his posterior assault on grammar, meaning and textuality. His was a reasoned hammer; not a child’s carelessly swung ersatz maulstick.

LIFFEY of UNCONSCIOUSNESS

Not So Free-Association

(Jan 12/06)
START: mother, father, gun control, idiot savant, bubonic plague, overweight, sclerosis, scolioisis (sic) analysis, bubonic flagellant, skinny legs and all, Joyce’s mother, Beckett’s mother, father, son, girlfriend, apologia, skunky, monkswool, terrycloth, cowl, cowlick, genocide, lariat, bolo, coke a cola, drudgery, mud oven, rumple stiltskin, ouch, lecher, Fletcher, cow catcher, mulligan stew, Martello, Tower, bower, scour, shower, April Tower, Billy Bob Morton, salt, fault, kilt, milt, soil, alcan, John Defienbaker, package of gum, slum, chum, rum, come, dumb, bum, slummy bum stiltskin, onion rind, other kind, mind your mind, apologia, lieutenant punishment, crappy shit et al, over night low, minus two, or more, or snow, or minus one on Sunday, no high of nineteen point five, or six, CBC satellites, seeds of mirth, jackrabbit, scar tissue, tundra, jackpine, Saul, Gomorrah, salud wound, hiccup, rupture, fissure, don’t think, things, Binge, Crossly, club date, worsened by sun, dial, smile, guile, out of stile, sperm, wail, snail, kale, operates without batteries, cats ass, moat, tower, millseed, calliope, Munster Hamlet, fucking Dane cunt, CS, DS, RS, SS, CC, enthusiastic CS, or, DS, sometimes I eat celery, never, Ariel Sharon Bottomsly, caught stealing, or was it kneeling, feeling mirth and rumpled with stiltskin, ny bastard, Mother, Father, Gun Control, Oedipus’ mother, Jacosta, that dead fuck, what’s his name, O’s dad, cookies, I Ikea 'em with chocolate chips, gimme some milk, you fink, ass Fuqua, muck, ranker, faker, steak tartar, martin Amis’ new teeth, gum control, phyorreah (sic), dietary substitute, cool, like Kools, smoke inhalation, removes stains, nasty little fucker, Sam Drunker, brand new bicycle with a basket and a bell and a horn and a jawbreaker bigger than a dog’s ass, or tits, or CBC’s dishes, never, flagellate a cow’s udder, retaliation, mastication, new car, old bar, too far, bowling scar, mar, mare, fare, care, tear, wear, stare, share, Nora Barnacle, Ulysses on the fucking Liffey, stupid fuck, route, mooch, worse than measles or a hockey stick with black tape :END.

BECKOYCE, J.S

Phony Fucking Consciousness

(Jan 11/06)
At 5.27pm this afternoon I asked my analyst if I might not be an inmate in an insane asylum, and what I thought to be conscious, or real, was in fact a dream or a false-reality. Perhaps, I added, I am brought up to see you three times a week by some square-shouldered orderly, unbelted from straightjacket, and plunked down on your divan. How am I to know, I said? Maybe what I take, or perceive, to be conscious, is in actual fact unconscious, or vice versa. What if, what if that in deed is the case? He cleared his throat, popped in another licorice baby, and shifted his weight from one hip to the other. Perhaps some horrendous childhood trauma has left me sterile of consciousness, unable to differentiate between conscious and unconscious. Seeing as we have determined that I am Ego-barren, a consonant Id, the thought has, I fear, crossed my mind, repeatedly.

It was you, was it not, who suggested I am paralytic with Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’, and furthermore, contend that I am prone to self-punishment, which is mitigated by the compulsion to repeat ad nausea. The Walserian similarities are most disconcerting. Fuck it, who really gives a rat’s ass what I consider to be real, conscious, phony, or unconscious, surely not I, or a synoptic simulacrum thereof. It just goes to show: something’s aren’t worth the bother of bothering with. Anyhow, dreamscapes are far more entertaining and much less bothersome, even for the synoptically challenged and Ego-barren, or those of us with funnels in the posterior nock of our brain-packages.

TELEMACHIAD RETURN

James A. Joyce

(Jan 11/06)
This afternoon I prudently grafted a picture of James A, Joyce from John McCourt’s aptly titled coffee-table book, James Joyce, to a $0.99 pretend mahogany frame purchased at the local thrift store. It sits atop a pyre of like-minded books next to a framed picture of Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s onetime annalist, not to be confused with analyst, or Dr. Wilfred Bion, to whom Beckett reposed back-head first to when he was a young aspiring playwright. The evidence that Joyce was unfamiliar with or had not read Freud is tenuous at best, although a prudent reading of Ulysses clearly contradicts this pedagogical bromide. The river runs, so to speak, circuitously and with little regard for proper grammar, spelling, syntax or punctuation. The funnel in the anterior abacus of my head, where information, datum, the odd logarithm and general nonsense gains access to my thinking-machine, seems to be fair to middling-full with dross, applesauce and ill manners. Perhaps a slight repose is in order, if not that, then at least a conk on the head to ease the ascension to unconsciousness. We of the Ego-less Id deserve at least such. Coprophilia, as is evidenced from my own inability to master proper grammar, syntax, spelling and punctuation. Fuck but I’m tired, fucking depleted I’d say.

Now that I am awake, I am unconscious. Wakefulness and insentience are, I fear, samesuch.

a woman’s mouth

the sky is like a woman’s mouth, you said
a soft peach without the stone

impassioned fruit, succulent and watery
sugary and sweet, you said

a woman’s mouth, you said
is like the folds in a child’s arms

doughy with butter and lard
kneaded into a flint crusted pie, you said

then swallowed in one bite, a languor
in the want of your belly

APOSEMATIC APOGEOTROPISM

An Apology to Mr. Robert Walser

(Jan 10/06)

Far be it for me to abrogate and diminish a genuine writer such as Robert Walser. It seems churlish and none too petty to attack a man, a genuine writer, for his psychopathologies. Regardless of Mr. Walser’s praecox’s, or his ignoble attachment to word-sodomy, he certainly deserves more respect than someone the likes of me is capable of imputing.

More so, taking into consideration my own praecox, or Ego-lessness, which simply serves to amplify my own ignobly, I haven’t an Adlerian foot to stand on. So to Mr. Walser’s remaining family, I offer this apology, albeit a sheepish one at that. He did scribble quite a bit, however, and with my pencil ends and notepaper. But I suppose given the circumstances of his death, that can be forgiven.

If it’s any consolation to the Walser family, the remaining Walser’s, I slept a charily 2 ½ hours last night. After 1 ½ hours of physioterrorism this morning at the hands of a most fetching and consummate professional, I feel I have paid the price, albeit a meager one, for my Walserian indiscretions last night. Perhaps more so, as I now have an Adlerian shoulder, stiffened, clubbed and of inferior caste and psychological facility. I am insane in deed.

ID-SAVANTISM1

A Post-Parricidal Indulgence

(Jan 10/06)
Rosehip tea, so I’ve discovered, is haughty and suggestively menstrual. It languishes on the tongue with a laconic concupiscence that reminds one of beheadings and minced steak tartar. I find a thin wafer of melba, or a finger of lightly toasted baguette, a most pleasant accompaniment to the further enrapture of this most inauspicious post-parricidal fete. This Oedipal treat, as it is referred to in Platonic terms, helps to cleanse the palate after the eye-gouging and castration of the paternal other.

It further aids in the lessening of guilt, shame and the prevailing malaise that general follows after the Oedipal revenge has been exacted. Rosehip tea, or crushed rose petals, is also a good pre-coital balm when applied, or smeared, liberally to the coition organs and skin surrounding the anus. Its lubricious medicinal character also helps prevent unwanted chafing and tensor markings. No other tea, or herbal potation, has this inveigling effect, perhaps a decaffeinated Earl Grey, or a Chamomile, but these tend to further affect the pineal gland, which, as you know from previous postings, is the seat of the Ego, or in my case, Id-Ego, or Ego-Chattel.

Of course I was privy to this oedipal lore while an inmate in an insane asylum (with the inveterate scribbler Mr. Robert Walser, who unbeknown to me, stole my notepaper and pencil-ends when my back was turned), where I was briefly interned for an inability to urinate without crouching in horror and yawing at the top of my lungs. As my Petrus Der-Boonekamp is full to middling with ends and odds, perhaps sleep, or the ascension to unconsciousness, is an appropriate affectation to affect, torpor or not. All things must come to end, find their commode; so to speak, even those of us wane with an Ego-less Id-neology. (A fine example of paragraphic trinity)

ID-EOLOGY5 (ID-SAVANTISM)

Ascending Into Unconsciousness

(Jan 09/06)
I slept this morning, eventually ascending into unconsciousness at 5.37am, albeit troubled. How I abhor the word ‘albeit’, so puerile, trifling and nugatory. All words, so it seems, are nugatorious. The cigarette brownie arrived this morning with a bagful of benzene, tar, ferric acid and nicotine. Gods be praised, hale with jocundity, merriment and good manners. Bereft of an Ego as I am, thinking is quite a chore. The serfdom of the Id, or Id-chattel, is a vicissitude that Freud left all but uninvestigated. An investigation, therefore, is certainly warranted, albeit well after the fact.

Contrary to literary opinion, James Joyce (Joyless, as he was apt to refer to himself) had no Ego, he was Ego challenged or Ego-chattel-less. Freud himself, the parson of Ego psychology, was ego-less much to his dismay and incessant childish depurations to the contrary. Jung, and the stiff-footed Adler, had neither an Ego nor a Super-Ego, as they were entirely lacking in Ego-ness. However, a case can be made for a Hitler-like attachment to egoism, or false-ego. Jung, after all, had a predilection for cuckolding and messianicism, and a rather diminutive sexual calliope. Adler, on the other hand, had a clubfoot and penchant for sweets and Paraguayan cheroots, which he smoke at his leisure and during analytic sessions regardless of the analysand’s protestations that he not. My analyst is kind enough not to snore during my thrice-weekly sessions, and is a carded member of Physician Against Smoking. Perhaps it is I that am joyless, and not the long-dead James, Leopold adman Bloom, sad cuckolded sodman.

The Swiss have not only mastered the confection of chocolate, but comfit of cuckoldry with a coquetry without compeer. One clever writer/psychoanalyst referred to Jung as the ‘Aryan Christ’, a befitting albeit over zealous esteem of his couch etiquette, and dare I say, sweetmeat elan. A common and shared characteristic of Ego-lessness is the ability of the false-Ego, or Ego-charlatan, to split at will, or in this case, under the guise of a willful Ego. This splitting, which is ongoing and tends to heighten during periods of stress and indecision, is a direct result of the Id taking control where the Ego should be; or more precisely, an Id-Egoism. Descartes believed that the Ego-mechanism was located in the pineal gland, just below and to the left of the basal ganglia. Voltaire suggested that the Ego was a political construct, used as a means to curb and manage civil disobedience. While Nietzsche felt that the Ego was a myth, theistic spectra, and even had Zarathustra had one, it wouldn’t have made him a more skilled tightrope walker.

The severance of the Ego, or as suggested, false-Ego, into divisive parts, or bit-Egos, allows the host to explore areas and vicissitudes otherwise closed off to Ego-intransigent cretins, or Ego-simpletons, or common morons, the choice is yours. The Ego-less Id has it’s function, the least of which is to sublimate unfulfilled childhood wishes into easily attainable primal objects. This fruition, as it is most commonly referred to, is the principle mechanism of the Id-minus-Ego or, Ego-less Id. To use terminology more appropriate to the Gen-X’ers out there, the Id bereft of an Ego is in constant repair, trying to meet the needs of a childish and often virulent Id-monster, or Ego-less Id mechanism. The most common manifestations being, an incessant preoccupation with masturbation, a peevish attitude towards unwanted responsibility, and smart-assedness. Ergo: Joyce, Freud, Jung, Adler and Rupert Pupkin. Thank you for your time, undivided attention, and most of all, good manners.

ID cAN'T sLEEP

(Jan 08/06)
frogstick3

the ox
of his shoulders
wale with pole marks

the spine
buckled and diminished

I see no end to this slow-wittedness, none whatsoever. Perhaps I can write myself out of this, an erasure, perhaps. I will not finish this poem, this sad excuse for poetic fragility. Fuck the dead, and their sad, pathetic, sadness. I feel sad, sadness, for the living, never for the dead. They deserve nothing more than forgetfulness, and when merited, a quick sigh and a remember when, nothing more. I have reached such a diminishment of self, that I find myself rooting through the ashtray for ends and odds, partial-smokes and nubs. A quid of chaw, maybe, had I any chaw or quid to have thoughts about. Like those Yeomen fucks with their plastic beer cups topped-off with tobacco juice and slaver, sad, pathetic jarheads. If I weren’t a simpleton myself, which I am, sadly enough, I’d figure out some way to masticate the juices, tars, benzene and nicotine out of what’s left in my Petrus Ur-Boonekamp fucking ashtray. As it is, I have saved five cigarettes for the morning, or when I awaken, whichever occurs first. Perhaps I will tamper with the fragile nature of my Ego-lessness and smoke one of the fucker’s now, and be done with counting once and for all. Perhaps I’m the ox, pole marked and spine diminished, fighting for one last inhalation of benzene, tar and nicotine. Who knows? Surely not me, some simulacra of me, that would be sad, dimwitted and sad in deed.

fOR jAMES kELMAN

Greyhounds

(Jan 08/o6)
frogstick2

his last breathe
came up
from the bottom

a percolate of spit
and cud

the stirred skin
of his lips

bulldoze under
with the stick

still corpsed
with frogs’ roe
and mud

I AM A CRETIN

The Psychotherapeutics of Ice Fishing

(Jan 07/06)
I tried to find an ice-fishing show on television this morning but failed, miserably. I figured that a professional explaining the benefits of ice fishing, the psychotherapeutics of ice fishing, might cheer me up a bit. The ubiquitous ice fishing sty, a primitive cottage, a hole augured in the centre, and a scrub of bipeds stamping their feet and looking down holes watching red flags and markers on sticks. I used to watch carpentry shows when I was a drinker, or was it a miscreant, the difference seems negligible. The one with that guy in the dopey hat turning wood into spindles on a hand-lathe, or sawing lengths of timber with a bow and arrow, or some contraption he’d fashioned out of his hat and box-twine. Fucking wildly entertaining stuff, no doubt about it.

I watched a model train show once, when I lived in a basement somewhere without a bed, emceed by some cretin from Pennsylvania, wagon and incest country, barns going up every which where. Train savants. These locomotive scholars treat their hobbyist’s avocation like a religion, tiny little people waiting for tiny little trains at tiny little train stations. I had a train set when I was a kid, but never really played with it. And when I did, I’d usually get a shock from the tracks or the wire brushes that served as connectors from the train to the rails. Racing car sets were like that too, wire brushes and shocks all around. I much preferred Hot Wheels, at least they had no electricity coursing through them, all plastic and hard rubber tires and flimsy tracks that did the loop-to-loop, no chance of a wire sliver or shocks all around.

Let us now revisit the ice fisherman and the model train enthusiast. The two share similar characteristics, which can be easily explained in psychoanalytic terms, allow me. The train represents the male sexual organ, the penis, or phallus, which is run in and out of the model train tunnel, which represents the female sexual organ, the vagina, or crawlway. The hole augured in the ice, the ice fishing hole, represents the vagina, or crawlspace, into which the fish pole, which represents the penis, or phallus, is dropped into, then pulled up out of, similar to sexual congress, but much colder. Both the model train enthusiast and the ice fisherman simply sublimate the childhood wish to have sex with the primal other, the mother, into and through these relatively innocuous yet facile sporting activities. The incestuous vissitude, I will leave to your imagination and moral censor.

frogstick

they killed him
with a stick

the one they used
for fishing frogs

from the bottom
of the pool

he went under once
the second time

they had to push him under
with the stick

hooked round his shoulders
like a shawl

PHILOSOPHY and SOCIAL HOPE

The Gift of Ideas

(Jan 07/06)
From : Richard Rorty
Sent : November 29, 2003 5:00:10 PM
To : "Stephen Rowntree"
Subject : Re: Philosophy as a social tool, Stephen Rowntree
rorty Inbox

Dear Mr. Rowntree,

Thanks very much indeed for your kind words about my book. I'm delighted that you found PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL HOPE of interest and of use. I hope that your return to philosophy pays off, and that you will find yourself on a track that will give you intellectual satisfaction and a rewarding life. The discipline can indeed be pretty dreary, but people like Dewey and Habermas are good examples of the use that can be made of it.

With good wishes,

Richard Rorty

REMEMBERED/FORGOTTEN

Lammswolle

(Jan 06/06)
I am, she says, trying to pull it all together, but the wool, she says, gets all tangled, sometimes it breaks, other times it just sits there staring at me. Wool’s like that, he says, always breaking or staring at you. Wool, I guess, does just that, busting and tangling and staring. I hate it, she says, wool. In skeins or balls or mittens, or scarves and socks, especially socks, she says, socks, I hate socks, wool socks, especially. I, he says, especially hate the way they’re double-knit, at the heels and around the toes, especially around the toes, the heels, too, but especially the toes. She says, my grandmother knit socks, wool socks, with double heels and toes, heels, especially, but the toes too, always the same double-knit heels and toes. She died, knitting, she says, her fingers arthritic and bone-weary. Like twigs or child’s fingers, she says, from knitting in front of the television or while listening to the radio. She drank black tea, he says, blacker than molasses. She died, he says, from cancer, in her throat, from Craven A’s and black tea and the cancer in her throat. The milk, she said, made the tea too weak, too weak and not worth the bother. My dad, he says, tried to convince her to give it up, but she liked her black tea and Craven A, he said. I don’t remember, he says, but she stayed almost four months in the dining room, in a hospital bed, he said, with hydraulics and handrails. A nurse came, but she still refused to give up her black tea and Craven A’s, he said. My dad had to hide in the garage, he says, or out back behind the house, he said, so she couldn’t see him smoking. I would steal her Craven A’s, he says, when she was unconscious or her breathing was real shallow. I don’t remember any of this, but it happened, he said, just the same. My dad knew she was going to die, he said, but I either never heard him or forgot that I had, he says. I guess its better that way, he says, not knowing or pretending not to know if you had heard. My grandmother died, she says, from heart failure, or congestion, something like that. I was away at school, so I never got back, for the funeral, she says, they had it without me. I went to the cemetery once, she says, but it was too cold and the ground was frozen. I couldn’t see the plaque in front of her grave, under the snow, frozen. I, he says, don’t remember much, from my childhood, he says. Not even having a bicycle, he says, not even that. I’ll knit you some socks, she says, with double heels and toes, if that’s what you like, she says. I’ll make some tea, he says, and put on a record for us to listen to, something old, he says, from then. You’ll pull it together, he says, just be patient, it’ll come, he says, just don’t stop, it’ll come, I just know it.

FOR I. L (1912-2006)

Bone and Skin

Tailbone cloves
the heel
of a hand

Where skin
cheats fingers
and bone

And soft wails
where teeth
meet tail

And bone
cheats skin
cloying bone

From wail
and heel
skin and hand

SHAME ABOUT YOUR TEETH

Methadone and Time

(Jan 03/06)

His eyes are boiled corn yellow, crimson yolks bisecting a skillet-flat face. The pain will stop, never, he thinks, not until the pharmacist’s helper pushes the Dixie cup across the top of the dispensary counter, her lips trembling with the fear of contagion’s, unhealed scabs and a wet cough. The orange juice, probably Tang, never quite cuts the shit, never just quite. A million little pieces, he thinks, I’ll show you a million fucking little pieces, you rich little shit. Meth-sick, not jaundice, but death masked. Counterfeit junkie on a first-class ticket with a laptop and Blue Chips coming out his asshole. A million fucking dollars, is more like it, and fucking Orphan hawking the shit out of it, how fucking sad, just fucking how sad. Skip traces all fucked on his arms, divots and last hits gone wrong. Like fucking chicken scratch, scrimshaw and puss and blood tracks where veins are suppose to be; troubled over with boil scars and blood that can’t be scrapped clean. And you and your million fucking little pieces drinking Brut and Applejack. Fucking pathetic, man, just too fucking pathetic.

Come junk round with me for a while, he thinks, the pharmacist’s helper measuring his Dixie-dose, and I’ll show you what a million fucking piece is. A shake and bake with puddle water, too fucking junk-sick to give a fuck. Popping elbow skin and tendons, trying not to muscle it or hit bone, tip jams right through into the base of your skull, a fucking million little pieces. The pharmacist’s helper slides his dose across the dispensary counter, latex hands and a shit for brains suburban smile. He lifts it slowly to his lips, purpled and bitten through lips, not the kind you’d bring home to dear mom, and shoots it back in one swallow. Gums like tripe, maybe worse. The Tang never does cut it quite proper, he thinks, always some of the shit still grainy and half-mixed with the meth. But then again, he thinks, who gives a good fuck about a meth-junkie who can’t write a fucking rich kid’s travelogue?

DEUS ex MACHINA

A Theatrical Aside

(Jan 02/06)
Deus ex machina (deus ex māchinā, plural deī ex māchinīs) is Latin for "god from the machine" and is a calque from the Greek ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός ápo mēchanēs theós, (pronounced in Ancient Greek [a po' mɛ:kʰa'nɛ:s tʰe'os]). It originated with Greek and Roman theater, when a mechane would lower actors playing a god or gods on stage to resolve a hopeless situation. Thus, "god comes from the machine". The phrase deus ex machina has been extended to refer to any resolution to a story which does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is so unlikely it challenges suspension of disbelief, and presumably allows the author to end it in the way he or she wanted. In short, deus ex machina refers to a cop out plot device.

In modern terms the Deus ex machina has also come to describe a person or thing that suddenly arrives and solves a seemingly insoluble difficulty. While in story telling this seems like cheating, in life, this type of figure might be welcome and heroic.

The pronunciation of the phrase may be a problem in English. The Latin phrase would originally have been pronounced something like ['de.ʊs ex 'ma:kʰɪ.na:], in other words with machina stressed on the first syllable, and with the ch similar to an English k, but English-speaking people may be influenced by the modern English machine ([mə'ʃi:n]), resulting in a mixed pronunciation. See also Latin spelling and pronunciation.

The Greek tragedian Euripides was notorious for using this plot device

Godel’s Coition

I await Godel
slide rule at the ready

A slight arrhythmia
in gods’ stratagem

Slight enough [so it was]
to warranted a rethought

[ciphering coition]
from ex machina sans Deus

DOG YEARS

Forgetting It All

the smell
of Amphora
dark chocolate

and rum-cane
blue smoke
not a chaw

but a quid
and I remember
her hair

brittle as
wheat and rye
grains and salt

and I remember
forgetting
it All