This is part three of an essay, a textual collage, that I was working 2 years ago. To read it in sequence scroll back to Socrates Pharmacy Part 1 and follow back up to Part 3.
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ossify and beco
me boring, but their very cyclic nature testifies to their vitality and energy, their creativeness.
An economy, a new one, of desire.
A new economy of energy and form begins to take shape before our eyes (look at Bill Bisset and others, daring heroes of poetry in Canada which was a virtual Wasteland back in the early 60’s), as we become the thing upon which we write. We are becomers (in the DeleuzoGuattarian sense of le devenir), not makers, we are becomed by a god (what is a god but an energy of ourselves the makers – Blake’s, All gods reside in the human breast), and not craftsmen on a ship (called language: this does preclude being makers or assemblers as Perloff and others have pointed out); rather we are shippers (of words, word smugglers, merchants of language, harbingers of thought) and sailors, fleet on the edge of language, and making it our own. What language is this? not the language of rational philosophy nor the language of Plato’s Republican Guard. The cavern is the place …Plato…wants to get us out that dead zone (a little Steven King please) that houses the cavern dwellers, the troglodytes of realism. Oh Simulacrum and the poet’s fine frenzy rolling over sward and city hail makes the mind its own place a misery. So yes, Ion, the dear boy, (were his balls nice Socrates, was this little rhetor one of the seduced Socratic pile; one of those youths of whom Plato said: it was the beauty of the youth of Athens that made him a philo. That was one of Father Nietzsche’s quips as stated in Twilight of the Idols.) thou art not a master of neither prose, nor day and night, but to speak and shout these Homeric rants and raves, yes, Ion thou art a mastered thing of the God, as it were. You,
Ion, the god uses you like a plucked instrument to get his message across. But wait that word message, it means another thing completely to Mchulan, it means that you Ion are the message, wait, what happens to Homer’s tales then, his tales of the tribes and other things, like wheelbarrows in the rain, or Omeros reading Ulysses by Joyce S. Grant, what happens if our message is the form of a previous meaning, what becomes then of our idealistic mediumistic message? Is there no form in this content? and what is content, anyhow, Ion? Is it Sublime, dear one,drear one? Does Socrates bat your butt with the sublime of the ancient love of Paris? and yes, god is dead, and his scattered remnants are our ruin, our allegory of desire – no more unified Jesus, but a scattered resurrecting multiplying Jesus of manyness . Magic is alive. The Crow has passed. It is all myth. Brown (Norman O.) and the passage of schizophrenia and the monkeys, the beat line the line of flight. It is not either or but neither nor, a many that is a passage. A passage across the transversal – a versal of reversal as in Barthes Nietzsche and poetics combined. We need a poetics of combination recognising both the anxiousness of reality, and its generosity; there is no unity but a scattered joyous disunity a dissension.
So Socrates has a little drug
store with the word as unmastered father of the dialectic. And later, Milton and others will make a dozen tripes of it and go their own mad merry way.
Now sweet Socrates my gay dialectician of ultimate ugliness we are going to yak about your Son’s Son’s brilliant Idea that perfect form somewhere in the heavens – Rhetoric de Aristote. The botanist who wrote about Poetics, but now we speak of rhetorics: the arts of persuading and truth telling by argument and polemic. But no, let us not confuse those con artists the (there is no unity but a scattered joyous disunity a dissension) PreSocrats with yer grandson in philosophy Aristotle: (a little fake Greek by way of imitation of unheard sounds:Logoi Pon Polloi e Logoi: son of the Father, the Father. )We are almosting it, as they say along the edge of rhetoric and poetic; And what sister daughter of the muse will say it? Cogitations of death and theory.
In the practice, praxis and theoria are one.
This is like love, by Mona and Franny. (Who are, reader, two of the main characters in my book, the
Fictions of Deleuze and Guattari, or the Fictions of Mona Jill and Franny).--" rather manly"
The Fictions of Deleuze and GuattariFictions D&G 2Dear David (Hume Mister subjectivity, empiricism and delirium), in the West there is this big trip called P.C. or correct politics. It is a monstrosity induced by an obligation sensed by a certain class of people who feel the need to censor and entrap their own speech not letting themselves express what is obvious to the majority of men and women in the earth, to wit, that manliness exists and is no crime; to these p.c. readers when a person says manly as you did, they "interpret" in some paranoid way what a text might allude to; note that I say allude, not refer; that my dear Mona, is the beauty of text, it is allusive and not collusive in paranoid readers' consciousness. Of course, I being your only believer believe and know this because I am something that no longer exists, at least according to certain French theoretical authors; I am indeed an author. No matter how bad or good, I am an author. For instance, I write these heavy laden sentences knowing full well some will be angered and or indifferent to them.
Last winter while walking in a grand march against this war against Iraq I believed for a moment that something would come of it ... Some thing perhaps has come of it/the despair of nations/the despair of the movement of the People on the earth. Not the Multitude so called of Negri and Hardt, whose conceptions seem a little naive to me (Idealism is another word for this; but that is philosophical) not to say I do not think them lovely and wonderful and hopeful, and even perhaps right - but still naive, say, in a way that Kathy Acker's characters are not naive. One thing is for sure, it is true that life is not naive, but just cruel, like love and everything else about it. The sad thing about life is that there are no inborn rights to it, we are born and the rest is it seems a bonus, a grab-you all, some semiconscious failure to seize the moment... Now I do believe in love, but not the world of things. Perhaps that is what writing is, believing in words and not things. What it must be to be there, in that terrible city of Baghdad where all this injury, death and injustice happens is a nightmare beyond any of the rest of the world, and especially the Western world.
Not to be an essentialist in the face of the onslaught of slaughter and history is tricky. How does one become an historian or remain a poet in the face of hell? One does not, one flees and becomes something else. What one becomes I am not so sure.
I like prosopopoeia.
Rhyme is still a beautiful thing, though many deny it.
Call this Kant’s beauty beside Rimbaud’s desire to be a saint. being a poet. I know whereof they speak, and that desire is a machine that fires its wheels each day. Thanks to the desire machine we can speak. - the text tastethe mortal taste __
So then. Mr. Longinus. and Mister Hume and Mr.whoever has taste in the budding prayers of night and day. Hume is a delire called his period. Kant builds conceptual machines so lovely they are cantatas by Bach and Thomas Aquinas. Is Hume a subjectivity that has killed its own death, is that how one can explain the delire about Mahomet and Rome? Has does one explain a racial and religious delire? But then, what is the bastard wisdom of the lines of break and flow, the line which runs or banters the death of sages and wisdom... the great bastards of history.? How do we make and one what basis do we make a distinction between legitimate and non-legitimate? think of offspring, what is a legitimate offspring? Jesus Christ was a bastard, Marx calls Judaism and its deity, the huckster god. A swindling manufacturer of doubts and murder, a slaughter of lands and peoples. A mono gangster of adoration that Lucifer the polytheist rebelled against. As it were. Hume calls on the universal so-called to invoke and legitimate his rules for taste… they say Hume was a good writer. And I would suppose he is, what do we know about good writing, when Paragrams dominate. Where and when does meaning slip off?
And poetry fits in there, or really does not fit in there in the great conformist machines, it does not fit as it is bastard wisdom.. heretical and wild.. even the great formalist poetry is fraught with the hidden codes of wildness....
Ah, but if Mister Borges could see for us, it would all be clear. Blind eyed seeing man.
the Father and Son in Christianity __
The problem of the “Son” and “Father” in Christian theology,in Western consciousness And the mother and son union and reunion? "Mother I am about my Father's business"
Think of the infinite proliferation of Pieta ikons, images,
The multiplication of image and body, makes for a real virtual sense of becoming that is world wide and scatter'd , dispersed spread across the glober, the archetypes of the old ways of being... Can we escape the archetypes, at least those triangulations that keep us locked in?
The a famous (and now dead) Palestinian said “The Virgin Mary was Palestinian.” A powerful ontological statement under any circumstances;a statement that swallos everything up__Palestine, Jesus, Mary . Is it land, or heavenly land, dear Milton, we have deterritorialized the whole, and are letting it be reterritorialized? America (one part of America) calls on fundamentalist Jesus, someone you can call a friend, someone you can rely on.
The end of the world, the apocalypse. Fundamentalists' boats atop the water as it floats down and drains the world, dirty little families of the apocalypse gangstering up. A filth quagmire swine, gaderene swine, the sow, the fallow the sow that eats its own farrow, Chronos depicted by Goya, what does old spook want anyway, gangsters of religion and god, and god himself a gangester a reterritorializing machine working to take over the world. But none of this is the “real” god or anything to do with the God of Immanence and his disappearance. The Middle East is the dangerous atomic bomb of the future .... who knows who knows what the plans of maniacs are? Theory is concerned with war, as texts make war in their little boxes, and tools make sheds, and machines make cuts “coupures.”
Poetry and war, the war of thought and language, of body and spears, of lovers and their fears.
fragments of faces, bodies, memories, collective recollections ...
spears, of lovers and their fears.
ThE Primacy of Criticism – re:Wilde.
Of course, Wilde is having us on – for him criticism is high camp. He mocks the very act of artistic activity while readying himself for his own ‘fall’ and prison. This event, his eventual imprisonment is an artistic event, and not a critical one. Like Milton, Wilde makes ‘prose’ ‘criticism’ whatever is not ‘creative’ with his left hand. The left hand in writing is not the right hand of god, and the god is where poetry is written. Plato knew this which is why he banished us. I write first foremost and always as a creative artist, a poet – but this word, Poet, is now forbidden by the academies of elite higher learning. They have told us there is no essence, no thing in-itself and no artist. Naturally Wilde would scoff. Why Wilde not scoff? Joyce scoffs also from the heights of his eternity. George Steiner, not a popular critic these days, speaks of the secondary tertiary parasitic nature of 90% of criticism and theory
. Writing calms me down, when I started to smoke yesterday I wanted to write. but had no copybook with me. B., and the others, M and her suffering I want to comfort her, but don't know how, how many other hungry songs in the world?
in the wood the dark wood of preposition and knife
facing the south
the strata wore down
wore the tea gown
of hibiscus and tamarind
When Coleridge and Wordsworth write about poetry they write as practitioners as hunger artists. That is my simple point. It goes without saying that criticism has its place, but until the advent of heaven utopia or an egalitarian society where all are equally valued then artists are at the bottom of the capitalists heap and so must think themselves, must think of ourselves as better than and more primary than the critics, who feed off our bodies and blood. Remember the famous moment in Godot when who is it shouts “Crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiitttttttttttttiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiicccccccccccc!” I think it’s Estragon who shouts this out, he who used to be a poet, now in tattered rags. It is not the poet who is unknown, but his audience. The practice of theory by those who make is not identical to those who do not make. I am not conservative, in fact, I am a democrat and so for this reason I believe what I say. True creativity is like what D&G say about desire,it is dangerous. The critic can never be equal to the poet, because most critics make more money and always will. Criticism and the academic international institutions have become one and the same body – the old wild days of Jonson’s time (Grub street) are long gone – in fact all of the ‘old days’ of any kind are long gone. We live in the time of mass murder and hate – what cld. criticism possibly mean beside the poems found in a Jew’s pocket’s who wrote while escaping the gas chambers. I think the critical act has its place but it has become inflated – a sort of capitalist over-inflation…. I cannot say more. Wilde is the joker in the pack playing his campy games which end him up in jail – where he needed to go to write his last works. The love that dare not speak its name – this poet helped to advance human knowledge. When a critic does that then he gets admitted to the Land of Literature. But the guards to the land of literature are more fierce than the land of criticism the guards of literature are not he Republican guards of Platon – they’re wild hyenas and Blakean tygers and lambs and Frostian fustians the joycean jokers of desire and love, the jugglers of Shakespeare, and the hyperboreans of Nietzsche. None are equal, and all are equal. Killers and lovers sit side by side. It is easy to get in and impossible. It is completely anonymous and filled with fame. Many last tempters to noble minds have cracked in their efforts to enter. If Wilde were in prison and had met Genet he would have had a different view. Derrida speaks of the fierce intuition of Genet – see Whites’ bio of the former. The great glorious space of criticism is not that of the children of the seven muses and counting.
These notes and counting.
Orthographic errors belie a secret subverting epistemology. Why do we need to write discursive expository prose as defined by the cult of professionalism? Who are we doing this for? Who defined it? Class war is also defined along the lines of prose and style. See Sartre on style – I would imagine Fredric Jameson knows this, I don’t know. I have read only the Political Unconscious and finally I agree with Bernstein (and Perloff’s) criticisms of his generalizations and lack of awareness of the present – the present being that thing that escapes from the institutions of criticism and the bureaucracies – where Art happens is always somewhere and not so much always already read, but A reading of what hasn’t been written. Look at Bill Bissett. What he has done – this immense energy of moving outside all of the norms and creating something new, this is the William Blake of our time.
Saussure – are you so sure of your signifieds and signifiers the language that speaks in its name – Cow and phoneme, grapheme and Mouth.
“La pensee c’est fait dans le bouche” Tzara.Back to Gilbert of Wilde – he puts me in mind of a combination of Steiner, New Historicism and Bloom . Art is personality, a sort of anti-Stephen Dedalus, a Dedalus in reverse who believes not in the omniscinet god artist paring his fingernails, but the obtruding pushy narrator of Celine in the late novels; like Castle to Castle and Nord or Rigadoon where we keep hearing about the narrator and his personality and how He becomes an element of the story, or narrative. This is a kind of Tristram Shandy two centuries later. But all of this obligation to ‘study’ literature systematically is hocus-pocus, because if it were true who would have written anything. If before writing Christopher Smart had had to read all of Literature, before and after (him), then none of the poems would have been writ. Shew me and discourse, read the tale of this theoretical critical madness. Gilbert is cute and grandstands on the side of a kind of Paterian “swoonerism” born of a vacuous snobbism and boredom and discontent against those less fortunate than him. Perhaps this was Wilde’s fault as well – that as a man he had no sympathy for the class which surrounded him and which he perceived as below him. Thus this whole business of Snobbery and the dandy pose struck. Wilde reminds me of the young Baudelaire before he went bust – a snob until poverty undid his middle class arrogance. One thinks of Sartre’s analysis in his Baudelaire. Wilde is a great artist no doubt, but he was greatest after prison after Reading gaol, and the after percepetion the backward glance to hislife and work which came as a result of prison. Wilde was a bad boy and ‘wild’ at heart, a rebel without a cause, without a class clause except his own selfish indivduality. It was pushing this to its limits that made him a hero by going beyond it – prison alters the class consciouneses the contents and makes him a more ravenous man than he was. Religion was the cheap easy internal exile, the temporary escape which sufficed , the one he used for the period of incarceration, but was abandoned later. Later the real unrepentant homosexual comes out and is here at the end that Wilde becomes a hero, becomes something other than what he had been previously.
Having said all that there are interesting anticipations and confluences in Gilbert’s view related to ideas about criticism that go further , I am sure, than he intended. However, be careful writer, as you write, the intentional fallacy is forever lurking behind the corner of the next sentence, and the next thought.
Ongoing
Yes, that old dead school of ‘new criticism’ hides behind the bushes of mental thoughts. We go from no intentional fallacy to no Author. But what a strange leap, and of lies too, because this is never what Foucault said, or even meant to say. One has to wonder at this distance between poet audience and critic. Foucault knew damn well that writers and poets exist, but what has happened is this conflation of the whole issue. As people hang on to a word, and cut their teeth on it…(it’s difficult to imagine we even bother to discuss this old history. It’s been near to a hundred years…the academy lags behind as usual) American poetry may have resisted change on the official level but on the ground American poetry was the line of flight, the movement forward – without knowing it Deleuze was right in saying that American and English literature were superior – I mean he was not familiar with the great surges ‘forward’ taking place in American poetry… but these things are molecular and ‘small’ so how could anyone be aware of ‘everything’? It’s in the nature of these things that they are not known, but fluid and escaping constantly…. Indeed the sooner they are known they become reterritorialized.
"I sing...the body electric, a song of myself, a song of joys, a song of occupations, a song of prudence, a song of the answerer, a song of the broad-axe, a song of the rolling earth, a song of the universal..."
me boring, but their very cyclic nature testifies to their vitality and energy, their creativeness.
store with the word as unmastered father of the dialectic. And later, Milton and others will make a dozen tripes of it and go their own mad merry way.
The multiplication of image and body, makes for a real virtual sense of becoming that is world wide and scatter'd , dispersed spread across the glober, the archetypes of the old ways of being... Can we escape the archetypes, at least those triangulations that keep us locked in?
Poetry as a Way of Life not just an expression of the Soi-Meme_this poetry of the future of what are becomings-to-be exists now and yet exists on a virtual plane and is a process of definit'in and fiction criss cross frontiers mix melodies perform verse machines magics boundaries as usual A Recalltopoetryisawayof life and so many others et tant d'autres et tant d'autre_
