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.

American movies >>>>>>>> French theory ✅✅📲📲🤘🤘🧨🧨

It was first nature to make a joke of a bad life-threatening situation, like abortion.

It was second nature to make a politics out of a bad life-threatening situation, like polio or Ginsberg imitators.

Mutatis mutandis it was third nature to make a poetics out of obscurity, to neologize a path back to the beds and minds of the young and libidinally hungry, whose youth made them invulnerable back when there was such a thing.

This was in the past of course, this time of these three natures, after the rise of the destroyer of worlds and the revolutionary chic, before the morning in America and the deflationary pressure on high leverage derivatives or currency hedges, blowing up all funds in a cloud of clotted cocaine blood.

Everyone worshipped Hitchcock, and the arbiters of deconstructive taste commissioned a scientific study on the diastolic-systolic difference that might come from watching Marlon Brando, but the unknown stuff.

Remarriage comedies as described in low rent zines of Cocteau aficionados kept the steel mills in Pittsburgh humming and the brothels in St Germain full.

It was a real humdinger of a synthesis.

Was it in a movie or a book where we first encountered the evil Queen who used to bathe nightly in the blood of young virgins to keep her skin taut and to stave off the sad saggy irrelevance of aging beauty?

So went the New Historicism once Stillman had his talkies made and the Slacker in the Hill Country made of ambivalence a high art, coupled with some parties at the Moon Tower and a rifleman in the clock tower.

Maybe all movies are texts in the way that every pillow is something to be humped to a yellow lab in his rut. Nails and hammers and such.

Sitting in a room, content, wrestling with whether a mirror or a lamp wins the dominant consciousness metaphor, until that metaphor comes bundled in the idea of a computer, and knowing that this contentment was a second-order kind, pale and arbitrarily contained, in comparison to Indiana Jones almost having his heart pulled out and becoming momentarily a possessed blood crazed monster until a child sidekick burned him, and yes pain can cure us of our delusions yes the pained child is the father of the turbulent man and there is no need to interrogate or problematize or decenter that or sundry other images.

First nature holds that to make a commercial out of a song is to auto da fe. To be accomplished is suspect. But abortion jokes still land.

Second nature knows Skynet is what one makes of it, to the point where mnemonic malleability overpowers even the most unimaginative studio executive. Empiricism holds sway, it doesn’t take a romantic to make clear that molten metal assassin robots from the future (as an idea and a praxis) will dialectic her enlightenment until she screams the paint off the walls.

Mutatis mutandis we make of an art a pose and craft a video of Paint drying into a commodity.

The apex of the pantheon to be traversed by way of a well-lit path, lamp in hand, mirror held out at arms length in lieu of a compass

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of the imagination.

G Davenport

One word for every week of the year. A completely tantalizing entry point into a dazzling intellect, deployed with so much playful and exuberant generosity as to make almost every other essayist of note seem arid and bereft by comparison. He could decode the cantos or the Maximus. He could tell an anecdote that was topical and somehow timeless. He could make you see what he saw by looking closely and encourage the belief that there was always an even more perspicacious vantage and always something more worth finding.

Not rah rah enthusiasm but inspiring all the same.

I liked him on Thoreau, on Wittgenstein, on any number of Greeks whose strangeness he conveyed, and so much else that made me feel paltry-minded and palsied. Here he is on the tall, raving scrivener of Maximus:

His poetry is inarticulate. His lectures achieved depths of incoherence. His long poem Maximus was left unfinished, like most of his projects and practically all of his sentences. He put food in his pockets at dinner parties. He was saved from starving by Hermann Broch. He once ate an oil rag. He was, like Coleridge, a passionate talker for whom whole days and nights were too brief a time to exhaust a subject. He wrote a study of American musical comedies, was a professional dancer, served in the State Department under Roosevelt, went to the rain forests of Yucatan, was rector of a college. He was taller than doors and had the physique of a bear. He was an addict as he grew older to both alcohol and drugs.

Carson indicates that she “wants to be unbearable,” but in a metaphysical sense, and part of me wants to sit with that and think about until the brain pan overheats and unkinks itself and part of me wants to just listen to her readings of other writings, her explications and probing, the ruminative mood captured in unspooling connections and juxtapositions. I care more for the fate of scalded tomcats than I do for her volcano paintings, except to the extent they place her into contact with that animating declaratory intelligence, its colloquial verve, the kooky violence with which it puts the learned next to the bodies of knowledge and desiring drives.

GD in his introduction to the glass essay provided a door and who knows where the path might wind once you took a step off into her poetry and went a-voyaging and if you ever were to find your way back to take a deep breath, you might go back to see if there were another door, to Iceland or Denmark or Joyce and Balthus, wanting to have the same highly calibrated powers of observation trained on something new about which you know little and so go to GD, on whom next to nothing is lost.

It seems like most people ask:  how can i throw my life away in the least unhappy way possible? SB, of whole earth fame

Falling leaves you destitute, depraved, & sordidly disorganized

Falling leaves are an October necessity, even if the sun beat down at this upper latitude in a high-80 swoon. This particular bout of introspection afflicting you is bought and paid for by the brain trust at Female Sadness, Incorporated.

The power of a secret is intoxicating. This fact is known on the page by the producers and the editors and the storyboard engineers, and in the blood by the sociopaths and amoralists and the shot-callers. The opposite of the secret - the emergent new category - could be summoned and cosplayed by the cirrhotically inclined copy writers with sleeve tattoos and a November trip to Cambodia and the it girls who, at 28, feel everything start slipping and go white at the thought of being out to pasture. Betwwixt the tongue and the teeth the cool new thing starts to flag and wizen, like a spazzy stabbed krylon balloon at a 2nd grade birthday party.

At least soulless ascent to power has come and gone. We all still can find photographs that have the punctum, even if none exist on the rolls on our own phones. Sometimes a good, vital sense of hatred helps to give that same sense of ripping through the fabric and setting things to rights.

By dint, by inclination, by tendency, by penchant, by disposition, by fate, by unerring determinism

I don’t know that I’ve learned much, but it still seems true that trouble lurks in the thought that to be contradicted is to be persecuted. And lately it’s not a thought, worse, a feeling, rising steady like a tsunami and crashing deadly like a bunker buster.

Even the most homeless of the unhomed have found the Hobsons choice between all these pussified Darth Vaders stewing in their slogans, bile, and vituperative glee and all this unhinged Id with the tats and the dip and the wraparound gaterz, none of which is admissible at the protective order hearing.

By what inevitable degree does bent become inclination, inclination tendency, tendency penchant, penchant disposition, disposition fate? S.E.

I keep forgetting that a fundamental precept of post-world war II American life is that the government, in its functional and theoretical arms and as incarnated in the men and women of officialdom, is always lying and deflecting and covering up. It is entirely possible that each administration of each Presidency in the 21st century committed, or has aided and abetted the commission of, acts that would be viewed as war crimes in the minds of the authors of the Geneva Commission. I keep forgetting about Manufacturing Consent and the all too human proclivity to be able to ignore facts, the acknowledgment of which would turn the lights off and the pantry barren. I keep forgetting about the Saturday Night Massacre and the specter of what wielding power does to intentions. I keep forgetting that situations and scenarios change in the particulars, but human frailty and avarice and the false trail of virtue signaling endures and deepens, extending its capillaries ever deeper into ever darker areas.

And so I amble on through life, afflicted with all this amnesia, trying in the early hours of an insomniac’s early morning stupor not to take too seriously the grandiose self’s insistence that this insight into what this historical moment portends is unique, with all the enigmatic delusions that attach to the idea of uniqueness.

One minute in the skull and the next in the belly. S.B.

Oedipus wasn’t all that complicated really. He keeps living on and on in this enduringly long-lived but essentially false story about fate. beneath it, in the white space and at the margins at the end of declaratory statements, is a better story, told as farce.

Vengeful daughters won’t let the men who killed their fathers be buried, just as vengeful but mortal demigods will drag their vanquished enemy for days behind fast-depleted horses. Alexander uncorked the wine the day after the day he woke to find he had slain his best friend in a blind drunk stupor and halted the army to fire the pyre in mourning.

It’s not complicated unless it pays to be perceived as complicated.

Suppurating heart wound, in a good way. Or in a could-be-worse way

Supposing truth is a woman and also God is a woman (which reframes Mary’s experience, clearly) and that we still have books and binders of women, and anyone reading this understands that some women in the past were not women but gods. Supposition that until next Tuesday as a kind of marinade for framing this consideration. Now: are we finally past the point where women will get behind a woman to serve as the truth and embody the persona of God? To vote for that metaphysics, declare it to be so. Or is that point in the future?

men and women make their own history, but not the circumstances of their own making.

Succession auteur, by way of the 18th Brumaire, said something like this, in accounting for the prevailing view of his Roys. The Rex est regnum but with piss stained rugs and loveless marriages and the variegated spectrum of prostitutes for sex for lucre for power for spite for joylessness - all the things to be sold for.

And if the canon were to specify that from the actual labor and intellection of the toilers and the strivers comes money, for which the toil and the striving are directed, and out of which comes status and opportunity to go to bed with an ideal partner, then does that canon attach to reality at when? At what point is it first weaponized?

To conceive of a way to hate a kind of life that isn’t born from envy or perceived to be.

It’s not clear that fantasy or speculative fiction is any farther or closer than the real politik portraits of the .0000001 percent, at least when it comes to hitting on what is going on and which levers are being pulled to push ever-accelerating history down its current greasy slope. This murky quality is of a piece with not being 23 anymore and not being stricken with the whirl-is-king panic of irreducibility all the way down. So art and volatile relationships or despondent problem drinking or sobriety and cold plunges, but also art. Then maybe some parenting, early onset like dementia or diagnostically elusive like TB.

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that when the CIA charisma-farmer recounts the boast that “flies would be walking across their eyeballs,” it wasn’t just a desire to project a directionally if not epistemologically closed system, but to reclaim the rightful place of order and comprehensibility and the father who could set things to right in a world in which everything would be ok just wait and see there is a plan even if it is not this plan and not being able to instantiate the plan is part of this plan, which is but a node on a larger one. Just so long as no one comes to see it all as a palimpsest made readable only if held up to a mirror to make these backward ass letters come to resemble themselves in their very difference.

Ripeness is all vs readiness is all

Having not quite completed the annotated study of the Rule of Law as the Law of Rules, with an emphasis on the rhetorical tropes as a funhouse of mirrors, I gave up and read Shakespeare. Tenure could wait, or so I thought.

The first reading is what Hamlet meant when he said Readiness is all. It does not, surprisingly, address survivalists or self-help influencers who want to be auteurs. Dying with zero, discipline equaling freedom, stoicism as a daily calendar - cramming Hamlet into that racket proved to visit too much conceptual violence than could be borne. But Notorious B I G and ready to die was a skeleton key text that helped turn what Horatio heard into just the kind of flotsam and jetsam that the book buyer at FSG would find alluring and, even better, sellable as whetting an appetite, a decimated lack from which the masses didn’t know they were suffering.

From there the first reading of ripeness is all fell like meat from a bone of a brisket that a wealthy celebrity enthusiast of wood chip grills and sous Vide cryovac dilettantism might post about. Lear knew what Shakespeare didn’t yet conceive, but eventually birthed, just like Doubting Thomas knew what faint-hearted Antonin so obviously wrote but couldn’t intentionally say or at least could say it intentionally but not mean it: Roll it all back to 1920. Here, of course, Bryan Garner is Cordelia.