Acquisitive Artifacts - Seductive Protocols, Shards, Statues, Paint on Canvas I

This protocolized snippet is going to keep reverberating for days in the minded frame in which the me-myself is presently, if anxiously, marooned:

When everything is inside the belly of the technological beast,

there is no “outside” or “underbelly.” There is only a range of

postures of greater or lesser agency that one can adopt while on the

inside. The greater the attunement to the protocolized environment,

the greater the agency. The greater the attunement to mere

technocracy, the lower the agency.

CC BY-NC 4.0, Summer of Protocols | Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Josh Davis (Introduction)

From a saunter of 4 days

The crack in the wall completes the Vorticist disarray.

Not just voluptuous models cavorting with bulldogs

It is the unspeakably cool detachment, the techne’, which has no designs on being unspeakably moving, which ends up becoming unspeakably moving

The protests eventually died down, and the shimmering cast that encased the aura remains

Browsing Thucydides in Greek at the Grave of Dilapidated Sapiens Sentience

Asking whether classics as a discipline is dead or dying - whether from lack of sponsorship, irrelevance, or naturally, as per selective adaptation, because our population isn’t capable of declensioning and memorizing - is no way to break new ground. Plowing old ground is what centers us. And so talk of attic Greek being revitalized is the same song sung at a different pitch as talk of the hip new cache of Catholicism. Faux serious people gather more attention. Still, we may need Herodotus and Archilochos, just as we need Seth Bernadete and Bernard Williams, to steer toward a non-brute future and to preserve a means of acknowledging that depends on something other than instrumentalism and blind intuition. A non brute future may be illusory given the bare life that overwhelms and outshouts, but for the sake of argument, we continue . . .

Classics are a loaded pill or loaded dice or a loaded gun, depending on your favored neoliberal trope. Better to sneak up on the idea through esoteric takes on a different subject matter expertise that is more marginal, even lower stakes, and of relative negative utility today other than status mongering and tax dodging E.g., better to think about how we might not crater our third of the civilizational Rubik’s cube and use up all hegemonic capital in the meantime by thinking about paint and canvas and how the only way out is through.

What was Impressionism and what does it show about how to see what is being looked at? Or what does it tell about how seeing is looking at or (perhaps, with any puffery and brio and panache) how seeing is different than looking?

The mirror is the lamp is the poet-self understanding that the lens through which the world is viewed very much is the province of the poet-self. Enlightenment reason can put God back into a text and the sun not the earth in the center of a giant freezing cold black abyss but it doesn’t account for all these big feelings I have about being inconsequential meat made from stardust. And it doesn’t harness the Alps and the sense of placedness being in the lakes confers, as an antidote to being thrown into the world, semi bereft.

And so the easel out there in plein aire also has a story to tell. Looking hard enough to show what is being seen and how looking hard can reveal what seeing is - an exhausting task that does not exhaust the representational modes but adds one to the repertoire. Painting not out of faith and ecclesiastical alignment (fra Angelica), not of skepticism and the portraiture of the high born preterite elite from whom Europe is being born (Rembrandt and Goya), but out of the inside of these new eyes to which the new unbounded self is beholden if not bound.

Forget about the guilds and the academies and the art-in-institutions . . . Embrace and love penury, hobo bohemian flaneuring, the worshipful need embedded in egg white priming on a freshly stretched canvas, and whatever wild license you grant yourself to take. Not yet free enough to return to the archaic or to be chaste channelers of the real dialect of the erotic, but certainly free enough to make a new language that will refuse to relitigate the marginal bounds of the figurative and will take it as the imperative to push them further still.

The mystic arts . . . Erasing death . . . All Signs

Houston, we have liftoff. A braid of themes that twist around dark blood soaking into the ground. Making an American go of it by entering into a tragic scene with a solution offered at a fair competitive price: clean up the viscera and the brain and the stains a body leaves behind. It could be staged but for each setting a different frame for the act of cleaning up.

The cast includes the staff of the clean up crew, a variegated stew of dysfunctions whose individual timbres and indwelling tones come as a useful counterpoint to the customers, all of whom are in need of the solution that stanches up a mess (the blood! The death!) beyond their powers to handle themselves. Discrete offer and acceptance, with the possible involvement of homeowners insurance. These customers themselves a chorus of lonely souls wailing and flagellating themselves in cavernous physical space, with no screens at hand to mediate the experience, sometimes suicide sometimes just isolated soul who no one knew had died until the bloated liquification stage and the stench alerts someone adjacent to the scene.

Social degeneracy becalms the one who could not keep going in the face of his own personally witnessed tragedy, who gave up on life and cadged money from those who loved him as though to make the love become multihued with pain and halting conversations about credits and debts and how sometimes what doesn’t kill doesn’t make you stronger it just means the kind of life you can manage is far more brutally provisional and amputated in spirit for others to bear witnessing.

You could say the tragedy happened to him but couldn’t say was experienced because the dissociation kicked in as it was happening. It could be like a film of someone else, some other poor miserable speck getting pushed into the heap of sad sackitude. And being an asshole, being unrepentant, years later, is a workable template to follow. Keeping everyone away and angry with him is a calming salve guarding against feelings too overpowering and shattering to be felt.

Analgesics exist for good reason.

Autonomous discourse producing spoken subjects in a tug of war with the prolixity of ventriloquist parrots

Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains ————) I don’t know I had to google it too).

And all the bros that keep talking about physiognomy equals destiny somehow neglect to realize that they are walking corpses just like the pablum-conditioned hordes who pay their rent. every mirror they might ever encounter betrays a false image, one that is not so much graven as pre-constructed, the printer’s original cliche. So many mediocre remoras acting like apex predators, who on their best day could not render a cliff notes gloss on the baseline human condition:

Sacre Bleu, Mon Dieu!

And they won’t be able to recall in which late 20th century tome they read about a group of separatists who caused late night car accidents and a spasm of terror through the highway cruising public by placing mirrors just past the apex of a hill on two lane roads, which literalizes the metaphor of the realist credo. And they themselves, doomed to repeat a history of which they were never aware, will one night be traveling down a dark metaphorical road and encounter a rushing pair of twinned headlights appearing suddenly out of nowhere and no way to elude, elide, or avoid the reflected momentum.

And they will never understand: To get to the marrow takes more than robbing graves. Even the most powerful pair of jaws will require an intense drive to set them upon the precise point, at which it may be possible to slice through the tendons and ligaments and joints and crack open, with unapologetic glee, the ossified conventions which presently hold things in their place. Don’t sweat the obvious incoherence of the idea that the hidden, secret kernel at the center is somehow more valuable than the meat that sits shelved on it. I see your Gargantua and will raise you a Pantagruel

Their spiritual forefathers are copyists who couldn’t help but try to replicate entire disciplines of knowledge they had encountered in text, skimming across the surface of foundations they could not locate, much less fathom. Copyists who came across the bloated carcass of of a dog and for the first time recognized that all the plagiaristic striving in the world could not circle the square and create out of one passing second another that might add more length to this interminable instant, which is the same instant in which we are all bound to be vanquished. the paramount thing to be experienced is lost in the moment after it gets set down.

Oh to be regular and orderly in the place setting of life in order to be violent and oracular in the eating, so that the legacy would be embalmed in the just so stories of self-sustaining acolytes who might grow to a stature magnanimous enough not to be gleeful at the prospect of surpassing teachers whose still-warm examples braced them up and nursed them.

Have a self. Have two, in fact. No longer are the serfs and the plebes and the factory workers and the tradesmen the only sectors trod upon and denatured by the way things work. There is a kind of virus, whose proteins are encoded with lascivious and insatiable amoralism that is pegged to the bigger and the louder and the faster and the more pervasively embedded. When the virus seizes, it dispenses acquiescence and dribbles of narcotizing entertainment. If everything is permissible, whether in the way of making a living or making a libidinal puddle, then the longing for the return of prohibition aches with more urgency. the anger of the neurotic stops spraying mindlessly at what catastrophe might befall us and homes in on the absence of authentic authority, the disintegration of a bounded moral code, and the ceaseless churn when all limits get lifted on what might be fractionalized into monetizable components or services or affiliated attributes. The sexual marketplace and economy, the allocation of sexual goods, the winner take all Monaco cascade by which it all gets unevenly distributed, like the present’s version of the past’s future.

No one need feel hemmed in or prompted to eschew a belief in the inherent desirability of being unmarked, undefined, a chimera or chameleon. The real ones know that being inscrutable is the best recompense that soulless, back-breaking, world-shattering striving has to offer. But high agency in making hard obstacles will-malleable doesn’t redeem a world bereft a meaning.

Nevermind the powerful sense that never being able to wind back to the source - suffering from an incurable bout of ontological amnesia - isn’t just a deficit making invalids of rich kids with too much time on their hands or Catholics who like the feel of the rosaries in their hands. Even the wild ghouls and the pathos-inflected goblins feel overwhelmed by the intransigent rootlessness and the diminishing returns of nostalgia.

Yet, in the saving grace, there is no longer any need for a cosmic intermediary. When the dead are ready they will rise on their own. Or, as the case may be, they will tumble down into the abyss. The cogs and gears of cosmic judgment are automated.

And the weirdest little ghoul of them all will smoke another cigarette, get plowed on red wine, and try to put a silver bullet in the heart of the anxiety of influence, worrying not one iota about how his physiognomic oddities might obstruct the fate that his art is creating.

The pivot that, when done wobbling, recenters the world, leaves in its wake the I which is several different kinds of tortured.

Since each of was several, there was already a crowd. Not feeling well and not feeling right in the head - cope, cope, cope, it’s no longer a world in which a safety net will stop, or slow, a descent into the abyss. A temporary gig for a paycheck with no strong indication to vouchsafe that another check will come anytime soon. White coats with clipboards, culling the damned from the redeemable, dispensing what multiples stages of clinical trials suggest is a necessary but not sufficient dosage of hope.

No, not hope, anything but the soft bigotry of an expectation that the historical x axis bends toward a particular ethical outcome at its opposite end.

(What a petulant, edge-limning puke of a person he is, descrying the idea of hope with a full stomach lying in a warm bed with four functioning limbs and a fetish for arguing as though mired in the bottom muck)

Each of us is broken, and on a breaking spree we might be set loose, despite the best of intentions. Somehow some with the worst of intentions as it relates to people can still give birth to something beautiful as it relates to painted pictures, just as the shy retiring introverts can dip their quills in blood and let fly with the most bilious of polemical screeds.

What would Harrison Bergeron say if slipped loose from the bells and the clanks and the equalizing handicaps and if permitted to on about his heroic, peerlessly untrodden path? What would it be like if more believed in the idea of Harrison Bergeron?

(What would it be like if not just the poor kids died in the wars? What would it be like if we hadn’t naturalized inequality and called it inefficiency?)

Don't forget just how indebted we still are to the Great Awakening with its brutal psychology of the preterite and the elect, and the unchosen. Keep getting held down in the riptide of the upswell of religious fervor and contagion that grew beyond all proportion and over all of the known boundaries. The sick and the hale, the young and old, all truck dumb with terror and fear of what spending hell in eternity or spending eternity in hell will be like.

Fate is that thing from which there is no possible earthly escape, and hell is that thing from which there is no possible escape, forever and ever all time.

No wonder the Indians found it all so fucking unfathomable.

Who’s the talent now, bitch?

For far too long, I would be ready with an apology. For far too long, we have let the mind wander from the reality that our bodies are made to be torn apart and eaten by beasts with teeth and claws.

All kinds of topsy-turvy fip-foppery is going on. In an earlier time, we would have been suckled on the tit of journalism that showed what it was like for the bus drivers or the nurses to go on strike and why they felt it necessary. Now we hear about the inconveniences of the bus riders, often including the person who wants to be sure to get an appointment for a colonic in the afternoon and who can absolutely afford a cab it’s just traffic is murderous.

I can’t apologize enough for what we’ve collectively decided is worthy of paying attention and the hidden costs that get built into decision.

When did the title, colon, extrapolative title become de rigueur in the book selling game? A subtitle just told me about how we are going to create the future we want and I hate to break it to you author and you marketing team, but this does not work for or work on me. I am a broken person. I don’t have a future I want. I don’t think I or anyone I’ve ever met has agency in creating a future. I come from a deeply skeptical and compromised position, with loads of historical baggage and all kinds of substances and blackouts and system failures. Add to the tab aleatory love affairs that just reek of shallow but clear-eyed hedonistic escapades. I come from a cohort that thinks advocacy is to be distrusted. And even if the two decades ago criterion was just make it cool hasn’t completely ascended back to the top of the decision tree, it still determines a lot. It’s not just a contributing source. Miss me with the marketing tags.

The slick pitch made by art world winos, the inverted bathos of earnest centaurs, and the virtuous circle of oblivious skin

A didacticism haunts the world. It wants to tell a story about the world getting caught, the careless having consequences, the seas rising and the iniquity and pain and death and squalor being real but unevenly distributed. The climate change novel carrying forth the new Weirding, in which climate and weather are hyperobjects, and trying to capture Capital, in its monolithic but felicitous chrysalis, undergoing its venerable face-sucking frenzy. Propaganda makes for paranoia and potentially the enlightening moment in the lives of a few consumers of that propaganda. Some of it is stunning. Some of it is bad. Of the latter, is it just bad art, or art the badness of which is somehow redeeming?

Or: under the impulse of the affect, can the whirling language mobilize more than the shoe gazing, muttering masses?

But what of our humanity, haunting the husks we inhabit from hours that somehow stack into days? Humanity becomes a password, a skeleton key to keep turning the crank of progress, inching us and the rock we push upward closer to the apex it reaches before tumbling down. Keeping going isn’t going to stop It from happening.

We gaze upward at the steepled glass ceilings and then back at the fire, worrying over the shadows it casts onto the walls. Is that ontological puppet show any more consequential than the shadows we see on the underbellies of passing clouds?

Shantih, shantih, shantih. Who was it I was reading back when I was young and would have had a corpse bearing a passing resemblance to the beautiful, who suggested that a beautiful corpse is in and of itself like a terrifying angel? Is this round revolving sphere more than beautiful corpse, a host, an anchor for the field and the ground on which inhabited bodies are themselves hosts? Humans are what technology thinks through, period. How it lives and propagates, full stop. Maybe you don't have to live in a cabin without water to have that concept gain some executive function on the otherwise empty fumblings of your captive mind.

Uncle toms cabin, a polished chestnut, but at this point how many will cite the lesson without having read the book? That is what being the exception to the rule is. An exceptional chestnut but perhaps no more polished and no less precious (no less dear to us) than a clockwork orange as ultraviolent art that at one point early in its reception led to ultraviolence. What is the message of the fourth movement of the fifth symphony that comes before the deafness sets in, or the riots descending in the wake of firebird? If we the concerned bloc about a boiling planet all pass along books about what a boiling planet looks like, rather than starting a Baader Meinhof faction, is that a triumph of literacy? Something inside us is trying to measure how it can keep competently inhabiting the host without taking responsibility for its degradations, how it can keep telling us fulminating stories so compelling that we can’t help but go on living them.

The stealthy medicines faltered, and the semiotic agoraphobia continued unabated

The body is a site of meaning-making. The king’s will is inscribed on the body of the condemned prisoner. The thirsty gaze is inscribed on the body of the beer-commercial actress. The in-the-know arty shibboleth indwells in the hierophantic title of the hot new theory take.

This soft body with its undulating lumps and skin tags is what anyone with a semblance of what’s truly going on wants to graze on, spelunk into, and interrogate the contradictions of: this one here, the odalisque, and this one here too, the part-time National guardsman natural heating gas salesman whose training time is technological, not cardiovascular.

Give me your tired, your mesomorphic, your pear-shaped, your split-titted, your saggy-balled, your hairy-backed, your wide-hipped, and your krinkly-eyed. Burningly ecstatic and anhedonically stupefied: our tent is large so long as some flash of Manichean ego death has assailed those who seek to enter into it.

Each body is a site of meaning-making and all the ink has spilled out onto the page like the palsied yellow subcutaneous fat out of which smooth, rich, scented soaps are sculpted. Recalibrate just how many butterfly stitches might be needed for the cut that transects the brow and pulses a stream of blood down across the eye. Oily yellow shining bruises on the upper arms and inner thighs, there is a kind of aporia to that too, a differential calculus of neediness.

There is that speech about how an increase in inflation leads to more unemployment and thousands more deaths and it seems like a speechifying speech but those deaths are when bodies become dead-air masses, differentiated only in the coffins that house them, and that is house of made meaning too.

Every body is a site of -

Shut your piehole.

But it is.

Or it’s just a body.

There are decorative statements, and there are declarative actions. I am interested in the embodied expression, the embodied emergence of -

What comment by someone you’ve made love to but no longer see still lives rent free in your head?

That I can’t stop feeding on my own self deception.

You made that up, didn’t you?

Festooned in the heavy signifiers of past selves thought to be discarded

The benevolent directive: Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them.

So we are told by one Jonathan, not Keats, although Lethe is familiar.

Coming out of false consciousness is like being born, an originating trauma. We have all this talk of the breast and the gauzy filter of the mother who is other and differentiated. But what about the breath? The first one following enactment is to make a cry. The last one before plug-pulling is (I guess) to put a full stop endstop to that particular instantiation, that single inimitable wink of a star.

Perseverance keeps honor bright, we are told and left to work out the detail that perseverance connotes a harder toil and a darker path than does persistence. We can persist in believing that the government wants what’s best for us, that incentives don’t cause the world to revolve as it makes its orbit, one kind of circling in another, that this time is different. And that kind of belief, held out over a generation, will give a buffed sheen to persistence. But we persevere in the face of inevitable disruption, famine war plague and exile. Or they did, the forebears. We persevere in the face of a complacent stagnation, having run out of post- labels to attach to whatever this present moment is.

But if we persevere in clinging to systematic malapropism in how we make our what we do and what the small corner of the world in which we have a place is really like, then it’s just upended turtles kicking the air and stuck in their shells, the whole way down.

If-then gets us only so far. Not that prayer or lamentation or ritual maps the entire arc of an arrow slicing toward its target, though, either.

I am tempted to step back and just ruminate on stories, on latent connections, apophenia as a kind of homegrown affliction. Maybe not just tempted to - conditioned to , beholden by. imprisoned in.

Scheherazade might help, but we are not kings, and love is not in the offing.

Before whisking off to storyland, consider the possibility that thin experience - that historicized, simple ingestion of data and raw unmediated perception of sense - is already incoherent, a theory-impoverished fiction. We have thick experiences - some thicker and more nexus-inflected than other - but all thick, nonetheless.

Like Nabakov and the orchid specialist. Catch the drift or don’t, but the point is exhaustive explanation never becomes fully exhaustive just as the most robust, comprehensive understanding is itself always a leaky vessel. Something still sits outside, no matter how adeptly we deploy our skills no matter how felicitous our redescriptions.

But one might think, bugger all that prestidigitation and just consider song. Just consider how it makes you feel, as if how it made you feel isn’t bound up in structure and math as expressed in and through the imaginative expressions of gradations of talent, daimon, and genius.

Six stable binaries combusted, and the Apostles’ exemplary lives groped at spiritual prophylaxis

It was like reading advertisements to understand what it was that we were afraid of and what it was that we were afraid of disclosing about what we were afraid of. The thing about desiring something is becoming frustrated with how little it affords in the way of eliminating frustration. As though we couldn’t convince even our own utmost selves that there was something stable to be trusted, something that did not shift if a light was shown on it.

it was like diagnosing a basic soul sickness in the language of physical maladies when what is most despoiled is neither diseased nor curable. The thing about us now is how important and seemingly virtuous it is to own up to being unimportant and lacking in virtue. Call me a walking and talking repetitive stress injury or a living breathing fatigue syndrome, but don’t you for a minute call me inauthentic, is how the message tacitly seems to come across. As though being intentional at being bad at life is a gold star to pin to the back cover of a self-help journal pilfered from a thrift store on Broadway.

It was like reading the lines of palms to ascertain when the brain and the heart and the involuntary metabolic processes would run flat. The thing about staying spiked and steady is how at some point wanting to stay spiked and steady in a sustainable way is not enough. As though we tried but failed to give rhetoric the chance to shore up the yawning maw that fundamentals analysis could not close, that cloistered perfidy would persist in sundering again.

It was like a warm amniotic calm and had nothing to do with sex or birth or dialectic closure. The thing about granting introspection a reprieve and just diving under the wave before it breaks over you is you are less likely to be borne back toward shore and then sucked out uncomprehending to where touching down is no longer an option. As though just finding a thousand pictures that might mean one word is the hidden path leading back to the wound, however indirectly, always exposed in one way or the other in the pale light of a harvest moon.