Supply and Demand

1. Great Works

Krishna speaks of three worlds like the Zohar (Kabbalah).  The wise ones are also those who hold the world together.  They keep the circle of sacrifice-action-nourishment rolling.  Sacrifice is negative supply.  In the economy of sacrifice, what one does not have is an asset.  Dostoyevsky accumulated many such sacrifice assets during his prison days, but only with the help of an aloof brother who did not write him during his four years of hard labor in the Siberian 'katorga' camp and ignored his repeated demands for money and petitions.  His brother was an agent of the gods of sacrifice - those cosmic auditors who pay particular attention to the levels of necessary obstruction, harm and misery upon which great works depend.  Great works notoriously thrive upon fragile relationships.  For one reason or another, usually meta-economical, such works can only be sustained by a faulty and inadequate source.  Most of Dostoyevsky's letters from Siberia are pleas for some kind of sustenance.  Books for example.  Hegel, Kant, French economists, literary journals, anything and all the details.  He had an insatiable craving for histories of the Church and Church Fathers although he considered himself a sceptic.   Dostoyevsky's favorite lamentations are those designed to move his brother to request his transfer to a post in the Caucasus, "at least it's in Russia".  The land beyond the Ural is mere administered territory, to be banished to that part of the Russian Empire is to be cut off from life itself.  His brother remains admirably unmoved.  Dostoyevsky's eloquence is wasted on him, a valuable additional sacrifice.

Still as always with Dostoyevsky, in the depths of forced renunciation he is inviting provincial judges, socializing with landowners and petty government officials, people are carrying his letters to Moscow and Petersburg,  and couriers are turning up miraculously.

2. Meta-Economics

"All Being should be transformed into Having.  Being is one-sided — Having synthetic, liberal."

("Alles Seyn soll in ein Haben verwandelt werden.  Seyn ist einseitig — Haben synthetisch, liberal.")

Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon, Nr. 79, Hamburg, 1993, p.15)

Although sacrifice like Being is groundless, the economy of sacrifice is strictly non-ontological.  Being does not have Being.  Can a commodity have a commodity?  Can a risk have a risk?  Being is - whether you like it or not.  It does not have a relationship of having to itself.  Thus, Being cannot sacrifice Being.  No matter how much Being subtracts from Being, it will always end up being Being.  From the point of view of the economy of sacrifice Being is not a great work.

As Being is always Being, its powers of metamorphosis are nil.  Similarly as Being does not have Being, Being cannot 'forget' nor 'remember' Being.  Being is never anywhere else except by or with Being.  Badiou's demand, echoing Heidegger, 'let us forget the forgetting of the forgetting (of Being)' compounds Heidegger's error.  The 'forgetting of the forgetting of the forgetting' is a new chapter in the infinite and immortal history of error.

Errors are exceedingly fertile.  They breed other errors easily.  Errors are hybrids of fiction and fiction, like interest on interest.  And yet, the lifespan of any given error is not infinite - like all matter, organic and inorganic, they too become eventually obsolete. 

    
A8Q6TUN2V9YU

Night Sky Quotes

1.

My Night in the Bad Class

2.

“alles was ist ist zuwenig (…)”

(Everything which is is too little.)

Oswald Wiener

3.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Unfall ist.

A Wittgenstein Victim

4. 

“achtung.

was besteht, ist veraltet.”

(Attention.  What exists, is obsolete.)

Oswald Wiener

5.

How to measure that fraction of measurable to immeasurable?

6.

Why is there action and not just nothing?

7.

“Wenn ich der Regel folge, wähle ich nicht.

Ich folge der Regel blind.”

(When I follow the rule, I do not choose.  I follow the rule blindly.)

Wittgenstein

8.

Open minds are like shared anuses.

9.

Grammar is Theatre

10.

“What is a sadist?”

“Someone who likes to dish out pain.”

(Older youth instructing younger youths on evening rush hour train from Oxford to Didcot Parkway)

11.

If there is no perfect logic, does it mean there is no logic?

If a thing is not perfect, does it mean it is not that thing?

12.

Aesthetic Pain

13.

Everything is allowed as long as it’s insincere.

Confession of Insincerity

14.

The poet is not bad (maudit), language has a certain badness just waiting for the one, who is expected to arrive.

15.

To be true to an event, which ended in defeat, is to be true to a lost cause in its aspect of lostness – it is to be true to lostness, not to Revolution.

16.

For years we resented the false emotions of others, until we realized they were our own and our best possessions.

17.

The gentleman is the real valet.  Only another gentleman can use him with no remainder.

18.

My sensations may be like everybody else’s, but my ataraxy is my own.

19.

Errors are immortal.

20.

“Logik der Empfindung und Fantasie.  / Logik ist schlechtweg Grammatik.”

(Logic of Feeling and Fantasy.  /  Logic is simply grammar.)

Novalis

21.

“Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.”

(In a really upside down world, truth is a moment of falsehood.)

Guy-Ernest Debord

22.

The stronger the urge, the closer it comes to passion, the more treacherous it was, the higher its content of falsehood, so that we have processed ourselves into that desirable phantom in the centre of all blind instinct, a will full of lies. 

Our Will is the Grand Lie of Being.

23.

Not even madness can cure cowardice.

24.

Your Empire needs you.

25.

“Ich kann ihn suchen, wenn er nicht da ist, aber ihn nicht hängen, wenn er nicht da ist.”

(I can look for him when he is not there, but I cannot hang him, when he is not there.)

Wittgenstein

26.

What does it mean to say that someone is lost, although not physically lost?  Does he know he is lost?  Or to say of someone that he is broken?  What is it, which is lost or broken?  Does he know when he is broken?

27.

There is something of the despot in both the artist and the philosopher.  The work of art or work of philosophy expects absolute obedience.  Each implies the will to absolute power – to completely possess and compel the ‘hypocritical’ Other.

'Tristesse d'Olympio'

                27th November 20..

Dear P. S.,

Is this letter just another “flirt du mal”?
The kind they should forbid? But can they forbid it? Do they have the power to do so? Who are they anyway? Presumably some greats of society. But a “flirt du mal” doesn’t rebel against society. Consequently society can’t do anything to it. A “flirt du mal” rebels only against life. Against the extreme indignity of Being now. Hence the grand intellectual fable of modern life is pederasty. That broken pursuit of the ancient, never touching the classical.

A certain universality applies only if one uses this fable of pederasty to measure the value of all life including itself (Proust) but not when using all of life excluding itself to measure pederasty (Cocteau).  Keeping in mind such distinctions are as vacuous as they are necessary.

Inversion even as a brutal fact is as mysterious as the throw of the dice. When all chance has been suspended - risk lies in the law of the favorite. Symmetry is the only uncertainty. The law of the favorite is both ancient and modern. Unlike horse racing, the favorite in the inverted world is the most unlucky. The higher the odds in your favor the unluckier you are. Antinous is the classic example. The precocious boy can seduce the man, the man can kill the boy. The earlier is crushed by the stronger. The boy dies but becomes the god of the man.

When inversion breaks loose turning quasi-metaphysical anywhere could become the scene of fatal lucklessness. Any object—its prop. So much of it is sleight-of-hand, now you see it, now you don’t, eventually a corpse, or a disappearance. The more unsentimental, technical or sudden, the better, Just like any accident. Thankfully, the lyrical romantic times of “‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ de la pédérastie” (Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe II,III) are over.

Nothing is ever short enough or far enough not to be possessed by the inverted eye of the crowd.  The inverted eye is satisfied only by mass collisions. The imagination is a second select mass. There the collisions are utterly disconnected from desire or appetite.  But only if the imagination belongs to an artist. Only then does bad infinity—the imagined infinity of an incomplete series—switch to real infinity (infinitum actu) or present and positive existence of thought.

We are not bold in writing you this species of confession. Marooned solitaries acquire the habits of emperors or Scythians. It’s our desert island syndrome. We would say everything if we could. But we can’t. Not because we’re withholding anything. The very wish to say all makes it so hard not to taint what is said by what is left unsaid. We’ll be happy to create the impression of there being more even if there isn’t. Although it wouldn’t be a false impression. The glimmer of a surplus is the mute denial of a wrong prediction we made only to ourselves which was true once and could be true again.

The curse of Candaules pursues us—all members of the House of Gyges. The evil eye is our own orbit. Like Croesus we have all been fated to destroy a great empire—each one his own.

But are all of us truly members of that House? If you are you might be interested in comparing your case histories with ours. If you aren’t then no harm done.

Our theatre is actorless and motionless. Our dramas are the location of inaction, great force of will is expended to turn back will. 

The ideal spectator would be tempted to seek ways of evading our mental and visual traps.  We did too at first.

We would like to ‘know ourselves’ with Montaigne whom we love but instead we ‘pretend to know ourselves’ with Fernando Pessoa whom we don’t love. Self-awareness means not wanting to know more.  Everywhere we look we discover sacrifices of a similar nature.

La Rochefoucauld had his amour-propre, we have our mauvaise foi. Our confessions of insincerity. These are our artistic emotions. Everything is allowed as long as it’s insincere. One should avoid sincerity in all things. Never be too sincerely insincere. 

For years we resented the false emotions of others, until we realized they were our own and our best possessions.

The stronger the urge, the closer it comes to passion, the more treacherous it was, the higher its content of falsehood, so that we have processed ourselves into that desirable phantom in the center of all blind instinct, a will full of lies. Our Will is the Grand Lie of Being.

Fashion is most sincere. Born to die young, it sheds holy light from the start. But fashion has to wait until it’s thoroughly unfashionable for its true melancholy to shine. They don’t have to wait long. Whatever great work of art ever made you sad? What fashion didn’t? The same holds for the lives of the saints.

We’ve probably said all of this hundreds of times—but it comes to us now as if for the first time. The desirable phenomena are so short lived—the waxy gloss on the fruit—and the inferior defective ones so eternal and robust. This thought is as enduring as it is imprecise.

We cordially and gratefully leave all the rest if there should be any to your most analytical and corrosive imagination.

Best regards (…)

Mallarmé's 'Grand Jeu'

"The automaton moon above the forest of numbers - every star an official secret"

What does the game of dice mean for Mallarmé?  ('Today's game has blinded me' - Hafis)  His premise: no throw of the dice can abolish chance.  Isn't that obvious?  Why would a game of chance be designed to suspend or destroy its own conditions - chance?  If it were possible - would that be desirable?  Is it a tragedy that chance survives all or any throws of the dice?  Wouldn't life be even more boring without chance?  Isn't chance the only guard against  ennui and tyrannical habits?  One often speaks of pure chance.  Although chance has nothing pure about it.  Chance is indiscriminate and banal and reeks of the mechanical.  I would rather abolish a duty than leave it to chance.  Chance is something which interrupts a set course.  It is a non-intelligent intelligence which surpasses and limits the 'Absolute'

"faux manoir
              tout de suite
                        évaporé en brumes

                      qui imposa
                           une borne à l'infini"  ("Un Coup de Dés")

- yet chance and law are never far apart - if only the law of probability and stochastic processes.  Chance refers commonly to all phenomena which appear to take place without the interference of some sort of conscious Will - as if of their own accord.  But chance itself interferes in the phenomenon of Will.  The reasons for things called 'chance' are simply unknown.  Chance is just another name for the unknown or not yet known or semi-unknown.   Chance is not necessarily unforeseeable or even surprising. Otherwise how would one be able to predict some sorts of chance to a fairly accurate degree - like the movements of the stock market or the outcome of horse races.  Successful predictions do not abolish chance either.  The idea of risk is a limit to chance - it implies those circumstances when chance outweighs predictability - one risks the difference.  Risk is on one side - chance is on the other. 

Someone who has no chance is a person whose situation is probably completely known.  As Odilon Redon says in a journal entry dated 1908 "Le peintre qui a trouvé sa technique ne m'interesse pas."(An artist who has found his technique does not interest me. "à soi même, journal 1867-1915", 1989, p.110)  There is no lingering remnant of the unknown or "l'imprévu", the unforeseen.  All is lit up.  Curiously this situation is considered hopeless.  Humans associate hope with the unknown - when much is still in the dark and vague.

Vagueness is a great inducement for thinking.   Once Wittgenstein began to contemplate the properties of vagueness he became disenchanted with the clear-cut world of logical atomism.  "Grammar", the demiurge of his later philosophy, is the epitome of vagueness.  The real futility, the exhausting kind, is the attempt to efface certain iron rules of logic.  Unfortunately, one never knows exactly what these are.  But even the most unassailable logic can never compel belief.

What is the relation between vagueness and chance?  Is chance vague?  Are bodies vague or is vagueness only an attribute of language or other forms of representation?  Does vagueness occur first in thought?  Thoughts can be very vague - as can perceptions.  Every thought, says Mallarmé, is a throw of the dice.  Then are throws of dice also vague?  Vague thoughts, perceptions and language are on one side and on the other side are bodies which are not vague.  Vagueness has no empirical substance.  Although memories of empirical reality can also be very vague, especially memories of feelings. 

The exactitude of language camouflages the inexactitude of thoughts - one can substitute vagueness for inexactitude - feeling, memory or perception for thought .  Only rarely, does inexact language disguise exact thoughts.  Novalis says though - the vague or indeterminate moods augur happiness. 

Baroque Quantities

If the Enlightenment was the Age of Reason, we are living in a new Baroque
Age of the Body.  Wittgenstein was one of its early thinkers.  With his radical
discovery – ‘Philosophy is dead! Everything is allowed!” – he liberated
philosophy from the burden of truth and logic.  Philosophy could become
businesslike and insincere.  Some today like Alain Badiou profess to bring back
truth, but it’s not the same.  History is truly irreversible.  You can never go
home again.  Not only is philosophy dead, the Critic is also an anachronism, as the Futurists already declared.  The Critic discloses the ‘behind the scene’ – but the behind has collapsed.  All that remains is inside the Scene.  ‘Outside’ is a fatal illusion sustained by the world of action.  Everywhere is anywhere and it all looks alike.  There is no way out and no way in. 
A similar time was the Baroque.  The forms of the Baroque are hermetic and
all on the surface.  They envelop and enclose.



1.
Aesthetic Pain – New Baroque


If quantity were not in itself a pain, why would one attempt to soothe it by 
allowing for inexactitude?  But is exactitude only to be found in quantity?  One 
cannot escape quantity by being inexact – the quantity in its real state is not 
less because it is represented inexactly.  Exactitude and inexactitude are found 
in language and other systems of measurement, like truth and falsehood.  The 
false scale.  Quantity has the rhythm of monotony.  The constancy of quantity 
is its quality. This is a source of pain.  To exactly follow a rule is not 
necessarily a question of quantity – a rule can be ‘broken’ in an unknown 
number of ways, none of which need be numerical.  The way to guarantee the 
least inexactitude in following the rule is to diminish the gap between the 
rule/order and obedience to it.  The gap should aspire to zero.  The rule and 
the following of the rule should be nearly identical.  Closeness of the rule to 
the following of it is the primary quality of the rule.  It is the same closeness as 
in the monadic enclosure.   This is also a way of defining baroque art or 
aesthetic – the least possible distance to the object.  The romantic aesthetic or 
poesis is seemingly opposed to this baroque adhesiveness of the vision and the 
visible  – the romantic perspective is a function of distance and the poetic 
elevation of an object by moving away from it.  The idea of distance: 
everything seen from a distance is gilded in mystery, poetry.  When distances 
fade or disappear, what sort of state sets in?  Threat and prose – that which 
seems unavoidable.



The baroque body or ‘bare life’ does not follow the rule-law, he is the body of the law.  
The gap or void between the rule and obeying the rule is closed or filled in by 
the body.  This recalls the baroque “allegorizing of the physis”(Benjamin) in 
the tragedies of the martyr-tyrant.  The tyrant who has been the law of 
absolute power remains that law as martyred corpse.  As a live tyrant or dead 
martyr – he is the indissoluble unity of body and law.  Agamben’s prime 
example of the gapless unity of rule and obedience is the Führer’s voice.  All of 
Wittgenstein’s rule dilemmas seem to be resolved in Agamben’s double-bodied hybrid of the baroque tyrant-martyr and the Nazi Führer – and in their alleged mirror image, ‘homo sacer’.



For the Renaissance tyrant or prince, cruelty or pain is a calculated means of 
power, of obtaining it, keeping it.  Pain is a necessary evil as is punishment.  
He thinks like an ancient Chinese philosopher of warfare – power is not a gift of the gods; it must be endlessly studied and evaluated.  For the baroque 
ruler cruelty or pain is a value in itself – as a way to obtain holiness, as a 
source of lust and desire, as the exuberance, superabundance and privilege of 
power.  Being is that which is there (ready to hand) for an audience.  The more 
aesthetic Being is, the more it is there for an audience.  The Body of Pain (the 
world of the unhappy) is Being which is more than just for itself; it is Being 
whose very passivity (powerlessness) metamorphoses through martyrdom into dramatic action.  Pain has the quality of concentrating all of Being in itself as affect.  The drama of martyrdom – pain for an audience – is the unity of the body of grammar and the body of pain.  Pain is itself and its own allegory.  This is an axiom of baroque aesthetics.  In the drama of baroque martyrdom the nothing of powerlessness turns through pain into the everything of power. 


Pain is aesthetic, pleasure is domestic.  Martyrdom is the affirmation of pain.  
The affect of pain, the propensity to suffer, as part of the sentient human 
biology, carries within it the potential transcendent plane – transcendence 
is rooted in the biological organism, not in the ‘soul’.  The allegorical ‘surplus’, 
the remainder of martyrdom is the emblematic corpse.



The German romantics rediscovered this baroque sensibility – as Novalis wrote: “It is curious that the association of sexual pleasure, religion and cruelty has not long since caused people to notice their close relationship and their common tendency.”(Die Enzyklopädie, Werke und Briefe, Stuttgart, 1962, p.493)



Ecstasy is a state of being like beatitude belonging neither to pain nor to 
pleasure.  It goes beyond both, it can blot out pain for its duration and 
individual pleasure vanishes in it like a ray of light in the sun.  It is a fragment of something infinite.  Ecstasy is neither pain nor pleasure, public nor private.  Although perhaps real ecstasy can only be experienced en masse - when the percipient individual is already dissolved into an indistinguishable collective or multitude. 

Ecstasy is one of those Unnameables, Being which is beyond 
language, the magic prison of the Social.  One knows ecstasy is real because 
afterwards it names its sudden price.  In the legends of the saints the body is 
made to suffer for the soul – even without a belief in the transcendent soul, 
surely it cannot just be the body wanting to suffer for the — body?

2.


When a Cold Pervert Turns into a Hot Pervert

Perversion as a literary mood might be classified as either hot or cold.


Bataille is a hot pervert, addicted to cruelty and sex exuding from waste and excess whereas cold perverts like Burroughs favor a certain kind of businesslike efficiency based on opiated sloth.  Bataille for instance was fascinated by photos of Chinese victims of Ling Chi, the slow slicing  torture (‘death by a thousand cuts’), a form of execution reserved for those convicted of high treason or people who murdered their parents - considered low treason.

But when the cold pervert Burroughs turns into a hot pervert in Nova Express towards the end or already at the beginning he gets very hot – hotter even than a hot pervert like Bataille.  In “Pry Yourself Loose and Listen” – everything is very hot.  Hot Hitler, hot Hitler ovens, hot nova ovens, hot Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hot Venus – then the two hot Nova characters conjure up a “Mayan Aztec God” called the “Mayan God of Pain and Fear” who threatens the conjurors who are too hot to notice – that they can’t pay him enough for his Name.  “Remember we keep exact junk measure of the pain inflicted and that pain must be paid in full.” (Nova Express, 1964)     The only way to cool down in Nova is on a cold jissom morning.  What is the ontology of jissom?  A dying word?

The Wrong Way

Aristophanes and Socrates squat next to prickly bushes on the shore of a brackish lake in the Underworld.  Socrates is wearing ithyphallic breeches.  Aristophanes wears a simple stage phallus.

Aristophanes: Was it the wise choice of a philosopher Socrates then before you drank your cup of hemlock, to spend your final hours writing poems, instead of eating your last meal, buggering your last pretty boy, because you knew you would shortly very shortly thereafter get all that and more but everything much better in the Underworld?

Socrates:  You don't have to wave the rope in the face of a hanged man Aristophanes.  There was nothing to eat here for an eternity. Then they showed me this thistle patch, now I am happy they let me chew these prickles slowly.

Aristophanes:  Who are those three heading towards us?

Socrates:  (groaning loudly and clutching his loin, his sockets turn a shade blacker and his flannel complexion knots up)
    Those are the Eumenides, my tormentors.  You'd better hide behind the bush.

Eumenides gather around Socrates.

Eumenides 1:  Who are you?
Socrates        :  I don't know.
Eumenides 2:  Where are you?
Socrates        :  I don't know. (low sobs)
Eumenides 3:  Were you here yesterday?
Socrates        :  I don't know.
Eumenides 2:  Will you be here tomorrow?
Socrates        :  I don't know.
Eumenides 3:  Do you know anything?
Socrates        :  I don't know.

They all laugh ghoulishly and fly away.

Socrates is left a bony broken shade in a heap on the ground. Aristophanes comes out cautiously from behind bush and is startled by the sight of a shark like fish worming its way on its belly out of the briny slimy  lake and heading their way.

Aristophanes:  Socrates look at this leviathan moving towards us! What shall we do?!

Socrates:  (still weak and limp from his interrogation)
    My staff, my staff, where did I put my staff, I still don't remember anything, where have I put it?

Aristophanes:  (watches helplessly as Socrates starts to chase around like a dog trying to bite its hindquarters)
    What staff, what does it look like?

Socrates :  Like a staff you fart bowl, with a curved head and a forked end, it's the only way to push those sharks back. Those aren't ordinary sharks. They eat shades, they are themselves ghosts and they eat anyone who falls in on the crossing and when nobody has fallen in for a while, hunger drives them on shore, they are like crocodiles, they travel short distances quickly.

Aristophanes:  But what about the immortality of the soul?
      You were so sure of it!  Eueonos believed you and asked for the hemlock cup shortly after  you drank it, you mean to say the whole thing is a big cheat?!
Socrates:  (to himself)  If Eueonos the poet followed me then my death has not been completely in vain.
    (louder to Aristophanes)
    No cheat, no cheat, but the sharks eat the shades whose souls, that's all that's left, isn't it, but polymorphic and protean, and the soul then comes out in the excrements and those excrements are eaten by other sharks and so on, that is the life cycle of the immortal soul.

Aristophanes:  So why don't you just let yourself be eaten?

Shark is very near now.

Socrates:  Because I don't fancy spending eternity in the bowels of a shark.
    (looking at Aristophanes very intently, oddly)

Aristophanes:  What are you looking at me for?

Socrates:  The shark only eats one shade at a time, since
I can't find my staff you'll have to do – (pushing Aristophanes violently – who as he falls hits his head on the staff which has been hiding openly like a stick caterpillar. Aristophanes cursing and swearing scrambles to his feet, grabs staff by the forked end and starts clubbing the shark which cries out like a human and rolls back to the water like an empty barrel. Aristophanes panting heavily, hands still raised with staff in them moves towards Socrates)

Socrates: No harm meant, pure necessity, one is already dead, it is not as if anything changes and you have my blood on your hands anyway. . .

The Semi-Automatic Static Miracle Theatre

The Hero of Repetition

1st Variation

Programme

Time: Always High Noon

Place: The Unified Force Field in a certain and restless equilibrium

Static Forces:  

The Desert                            Civilization
The Warden                          The Madonna
The Warden's Men              The Madonna's Martyrs
The Savages                          The Civilized

Static Action:

There are two straightforward opposing diagonals which make up the field.  Desert Forces move from southwest to northeast (vers l'orient) towards "Desert Drain".  This is the Desert Diagonal.

Madonna Forces enter at southeast, move to northwest (or are moved) towards "Madonna Slide".  This is the Madonnna Diagonal.

Notes about the Warden's Men:

Jailbirds liberated by the beasts.  They have sworn undying loyalty to the new warden.  They carry out all the necessary penal work on the new inmates.  Some of the civilized are happy to have the chance to avoid prison by taking the Madonna road to martyrdom.  

The Savage Madonna - they call him Madonna because he is so beautiful ("as beautiful as Genji") and all the beasts love to contemplate him. 

Note about Light and
the Semi-Automatic Static Miracle Theatre:

All light is a static illusion.  Light doesn't stand still.  Neither do static miracles.  They need plenty of light but no dramatic approaches.  Hence the semi-automatic static miracle theatre does poorly in the dark.  It must be properly seen to be believed.  The ideal location for it would be the piazza at midday.  Any side is fine.  Passing illusions are made of shadows and darkness.  Static illusions are slow but tend to last longer.

Kinetic illusions need darkness which itself is static.  They come with light and go with light.  The kinetic illusion moves from darkness to darkness.  Static illusions need light which itself is in motion.  The static miracle is part of the stability of the ever moving light.  It comes with light and stays with light.  The static illusion makes light seem to stand still. 

The Kabbala of the Face Angel 

or Moyshe Laib visits the Queen of Heaven Forever 

 1.

It would seem, says Moyshe Laib the poet, that I am a good poet, because I do not paint death grey and sinister.  I paint him in color and good-looking, really early, around ten in the morning.  (Moyshe Laib is a Bohémien.)  All the false poets paint him grey and sinister.  All the good poets like Heine, like Novalis paint him in color and longing like me.

2.

When Moyshe Laib finally swam out to his adored Queen of Heaven who lives behind the  waves, he took  his colors with him.  All that's left for orphans on the beach is the grey.

   

Pound the Agent

There is nothing more dull or sterile than culture theories.  Pound is not a poet really, not a philosopher, but a cultural attaché without an embassy.  

I'm not so unlike Pessoa - a writer of business letters in three languages, a writer of business letters without a business.

In the morning we had dream cake, seen only from one side, the front.  In the afternoon not just in the dream - from all three sides.

Pound in a Canto equates USURY (USURA) and SODOMY as the most despicable plagues of mankind.  An English poet and critic took umbrage at this coupling - he did not like it - not at all.  Sodomy is one of those sexual means of expression of a more enlightened age.  Pound thought he could curry favor with such a damnation.  Not in England he can't.  Probably he found both sodomy and usury to be unproductive forms of multiplying or as a Badiouist might say - multiplicity.  Sodomites multiply by converting non-sodomites into their own species.  They aim for a world made up only of sodomites but cannot (via sodomy) reproduce themselves biologically. In this sense they are like any sort of hybrid.  Similarly, USURA or finance capital does not increase value, they merely suck it into their hoards by virtue of the law of hoards.  Having that much disposable cash is necessary to oil the whole monetary body.  I just wonder if Pound had any means derived from USURA.  Without usury there would be no rentier.   Money without interest is like letters without the postal system.  Everyone could deliver his own letter rather than pay this absurd usurer's price of the postage stamp.

The enemy of the borrower (debtor) is not the usurer - it's the rentier.

   

    Pleasure Bookie 1

   

Romantic Fugue Sequence

Fugue forms occur freely in nature. They are naturally occurring formalisms. The golden age of artificial fugues is generally considered to be the 18th century — in particular the music of Bach. The 20th century produced some known masters of the artificial fugue not only in sound. Czech Orphist Frantisek Kupka painted color fugues in Paris before World War I. Orphism, a movement related to Cubism was sometimes known as simultaneism. The Swedish artist Viking Eggeling drew contrapuntal orchestrations in black and white. Marcel Duchamp’s Tum’ (1918) is a fugue piece.

But fugues are common in any time, in any medium — spatial, temporal or inside human will and will—lessness.

A fugue is a paradoxical form. It is both immediate and complex. In its immediacy it is highly organized, in its complexity it is wild. A fugue is in a state of rapid metamorphosis even if it is slow. Thus it is both elaborately formed and formless. Forms appear suddenly, seem eternal and disappear just as suddenly. This may seem by chance and maybe it is. Chance being nothing more or less than a set of all possible occurrences at any given instant. The acts of human will are as much chance as not chance. How useful is chance?

A fugue starts simply and becomes inestimably complicated. Fugues are composed of riddles — subject and counter subject, question and answer. Fugues are sphinx like, mysterious or cryptic.

A subterfuge is a very common natural fugue. At any given instant it is completely present in total but equally distant and complex throughout its extended whole which is the deception.

Any given moment is called an ‘episode’ of the fugue —essentially a device to distract attention from the subject. If the subject is the subterfuge, the episode is the subterfuge of the subterfuge and so on.

The fugue is such a magnetizing mesmerising force — you are transported by it whether you will or not.

Our street had a nocturnal fugue recently and we were caught up in it. The night started in the morning. No fugue comes totally unprepared or unannounced. But the climax is mostly still a surprise. An artificer of fugues must be very inventive to come close to the surprise of a natural fugue.

It was a Strindberg day of tormented paradise. The air came straight from the asphalt turbine desert.

A kind of dervish madness all around and up and down the street. All day long people did unexpected things or turned up in unexpected places but the evening or night scene was the most forbidden and unexpected.

We passed the waiters’ house on the corner as we do almost every night. This was an act of supreme repetitiveness on our part. It is a habit we just can not break. It’s the robotic part of our organism —the one which makes us brothers of machines. As we approached the corner we saw the end of a group scene. A tall blond man in white clothing broke away from a man and a woman, crossing the street and shouting all the while. He had a few words with an old timer amongst the waiters, black and secretive as the night. The couple moved stiffly around one another like cats on the street. The blond man looked at us too. We turned the corner nearly together. He was everywhere at once.

Saying as we passed to the black waiter, “voilà, see you”.

Otherwise they seemed to be speaking in a sort of pidgin Norwegian. See whom? They certainly had the evil eye.

It just proves habits are dangerous. They know we pass that way every night. Someone once spoke to us quite close out of the darkness: “Have you ever wondered how rich you’d be if you had a pound for each time you walk around the block?” When we looked no one was there. The cold servant eye sizes you up — you don’t feel them doing it, their only revenge. The Genet look. An instant travesty. If we had a dog, we’d go out too.

But we weren’t really the subject of the fugue.

The ‘Viking’ walked on in front of us, kicking lamp posts, moving works signs around, talking to himself, then disappearing up an alley. On our way back — we repeat the way not just the walk every night, all of a sudden he came back out of the alley. He looked straight at us looking at him. As if he knew we would be passing that way again. Danger was palpable. If not imminent. But still undirected.

We tried to ignore him naturally but we felt him right behind us. So all of us saw what came next more or less simultaneously if at varying angles and tempi. The couple was no longer in the middle of the street but they weren’t gone either. They had moved halfway into the shadows but in our curved line of vision. In the secluded corner formed by a boundary wall and the glass front of Ladbrokes betting shop they were having sexual intercourse. At least it seemed to be so — the man’s legs were now naked pale and long in the greenish light and he was covering the woman’s body squeezed up against the wall and glass with his body. The woman was in the shadows. It was quite a breathtaking view. As one would imagine soldiers raping the natives when they conquer a village on a cold night.

Unfortunately the sequence did not end there. The fornication in the corner had consequences. Whilst we were sleeping someone took a long old screwdriver from a tent next to our house and used it to penetrate the ‘petit verre’ of our car. The unknown robber stole only a pair of transparent gloves and green paper towels you can take for free from the petrol stations. He left his tool on the front seat of our car. The bride had been stripped and laid by the rival bachelor against the ‘Grand Verre’ of the betting shop. In the roofless baraque for pissing, fucking and weddings. The robber broke some other glass hymen down the road with a borrowed screwdriver driven by an indiscriminate transitive ecstasy whose danse macabre had engulfed everyone on the street except the cold black waiter.