Becoming or Understanding

"As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, imginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them, for when... he does not understand he... becomes them by transforming himself into them."
--Vico
Quoted from Tom Cheetham's *Green Man, Earth Angel*

An End to Nostalgia*

Mirrors are
For hiding in

The light too
Of incubations

Towering
Interiority of our

Mirrors our
Mirrors make

Curves
In the large

Universe this is
Remarkable

They make
Images

An obsession
With image-

Making
Images too

Are to hide
In

A sympathy
Of radiant

Coincidents
Images

They make
Images of

The creator
Occulted not yet

At sympathy
With itself

Nostalgic in this
Sense

A sense for
The creator itself

Absconded
To heal itself

By its created
The passion

And ruin
Of this hearth

This fire for
Coming

Inside inside
What

Dwelling
Will reveal

To Shamim Momim, upon touring Rob Fischer's *Living Will*.

"This ethic of resurrection..."

This ethic of resurrection, to which we have already referred (as an ethic of struggle against a retard, against a being-surpassed) shows us each adept supporting the responsibility of the whole Temple of the Imamate. By virtue of this responsibility the adept does not merely live *in* a fragment of measurable and measured time. He is himself the total Time of his own measure, and that is why the entire combat constituting the essence of cyclical Time is carried on in the cycle of his own life. Since this Time is a retard, the gap between the fall and the reconquest of angelic rank is the Time of the combat for the Angel. This expression (which results from our situation and reverses the famous image of "the combat *with* the Angel") is to be understood in a twofold sense. It is a combat *for* the person of the Angel of mankind (the third Angel who has become tenth), for the Angel does not carry on alone the combat which is to lead to the final reabsorbtion of Iblis-Ahriman, whose form reappears throughout the cycles of Occultation. But, since they have assumed his repentance and his nostalgia, his fellows, made in his image, become responsible in their own person for the combat that they wage *for him*. It is their own Iblis that they must hurl into the abyss, and in doing so they wage battle for the Angel who is in them *in potentia*. To reflect in oneself the Temple of the eternal Imamate is to anticipate the consummation of the aeon; it is here "to become aeon," to produce in oneself the mutation of cyclical or measured Time, and for each adept this consists in assuming in his person an increasing exemplification of the Angel's being. This implies that what occurs in and by the person of each adept also affects the being of the Angel who is their archetype and who finds exemplification in them.(49)
--from Henry Corbin's *Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis*

Soon-to-be / Hiding Your Present From You*

No center trapped no
Ageless words the center
Of our soon-to-be
Innocent fire
Fingers flick string
To air happening again no
Center trapped the fire
Of our soon-to-be
Our
Soon-to-be
Words fire fingers
Flick our words
Light reflect
Soon-to-be an innocent world
No present hides
A thing of mesh

No present hides in truth
No center trapped no
Words immortals trapped
The string
Fire fingers
Flick heart breath to
Bow
Our soon-to-be will
No past negates

A thing of mesh a
Thing soon-to-be
The lights the fire flares-up
The string song bird return to the fire
To transvalue a thing
This moving
Force against the bow
Stretch
Stretch this present yet

Spire the reverb the
Verb ticking as wood spies
A light changing somewhere
Inside the song
Somewhere hidden
A thing of mesh
Some violent present almost
A violin box
Almost a tick
Against the bow wood

Some fire soon-to-be next
To these gifts somewhere
In song where is it
And which somewhere in the
Song hidden spirit
Of his child-like violence
Distortion
The way to the verb
Tapping his passage

Somewhere in song a delay
Of the thing thin mantle
Mesh hiding your present
Blow distorting
This passage to when and
Some drums
And some
Drums pass as cloud
He therefore claims them
As movements

Or stillness to still the
Bow song space throughout time
Wait for the voice
To get there to get
Where
The song unsettles waves washing
These words
Suddenly the
Closeness of clouds
Soon-to-be

Suddenly the closeness of
Listening soon-to-be
The soon-
to-be words
Sing the
Soon-to-be things of air
Break your phrasing
The charms of
Your frame waves
Washing the strings
Who is still moving suddenly

Cut voice from air unformed
Unformed mover in the
Soon-to-be words
The soon-to-be names of things this
Bow
This bow against
Our sudden lips
The unprecedented
And present light
Nothing will hide

Unformed mover who can’t
Give up this place
The center
A bow
Cut clouds clouds cut what a gas
To find place looking
Down
Looking down at
The center
The center
Of our soon-to-be
Innocent fire
The present of
His violence child-like

Eager gifts
And patient ones to find where you will
See where it is and where
You won’t know where it is
The coming drums of
Your voice
Your sudden voice
Of stillness

Looking down where you
Won’t know where it is
Your purloined lips the lips of song
Somewhere in song
Something in
The light the soon-to-be
Stillness
A voice moves

Finds fills and moves
In circles soon-to-be
Fire of what we weren’t and what we are
The soon-to-be breath transvalued
Without resemblance this
Speed
This stillness of gas

A gas to cut the strings
To cut the quiet names
The mind mind of this
Play or suffering mind
Suffering
The delayed waves
And playing upon the eyes

What the fingers can throw
Thought rain luck talk
Through
This part to enclose
A cloud and to free
A frozen wave
To think these were once my words
Lucky cloud leave it alone
I’m watching
Out of my ears

California here I come
Distorting what the fingers
Can throw
Rain talk
Talk against the bow
To be a gift to be
A soon-to-be gift
Treating the strings

Frozen wave of these
Strings moving frozen words
Of this mind
Here come the drums
The strings drums talk the coming words
Out of soon-to-be cloud

Coming home coming through
The little words of song string bow
Drums echo
Echo for the present
Of this next home coming
Returning through
The simple words

The coming air of this
Inside the
Inside outside
Little words of song still
Happily
Happily inside
The coming of this inside
Soon-to-be
This
Outside inside
Happy and
Still weather as it moves in place
Weather
The song times

Tapping happily
Tapping
Claiming the clouds clouds hide
An innocence
Child-like violence
Of their soon-to-be light
Light through the
Clouds the end of this
Claims
A soon-to-be
Voice lifting-off
Our last night together

Somewhere in the song
Tapping
Happily
Clouds hide
Claiming the coming air of this
Inside you’re coming back
O your coming back
Inside

composed winter '04-05 for Arthur Russell.

Compensations for Not Knowing (a Proposal)*

Compensations for Not Knowing: a series of performances for video or elsewhere

Materials: books / texts I and other performers “know” to varying degrees, about which we will
speak and write extemporaneously, converse and interact with.

Intending: “Amateur” epistemology? / exegesis evolved to an imagined telos, producing excess in
absences the compensatory describes.

What won’t the compensatory hold?
Producing system’s inversion
Is it medieval to pursue this beautiful purposelessness amidst violence (when people are dying)
To unite the soul and the body
The mirror of entropy is an insanely deliberate imagining of information and know-how
The number of angels, the number of aeons
A conceit for ambient not knowing, gestures of psychotic insisting

How to proceed?
Will you proceed by questions?
By outright lies?

What is the difference between lying and the imagination in this case? Falsifying? What will be
your relationship to these texts?

Speech and logos seem at issue, what presentation is. The mind self-organizing in relationship to
objects, material. For that matter -- another mind. The “mystery” of what occurs when minds
involve each other as the mystery of why something exists instead of nothing.

Where to begin? By reading a line of text, a word? By reading marked passages or passages at
random and commenting on them? By bringing different things (words) to a collision? Chance
encounter as interpretive strategy.

Who is my addressee? Who is the real addressee, if not an “art” audience? Should the addressee not
be the mind itself? As in prayer / meditation. Non-religious “praying,” prayer in place of
knowing. Is prayer compensatory?

Prayer augmenting what we can not know, and only insist.

As the monologue in a voice addressing the other as an other, the doubled voice of one entity.
“no” thyself. “not” know. now thyself. I is two or more others talking to itself in the same
voice. The interior becoming exterior, creating place for the exterior inside itself, furthest
inside. A limit of inside.

To “perform” this presentation is then no performance. But the presentation of withdrawing to no
longer be one. Confronted by a shared object, or a mind also trying not to be one: by soliloquy,
imaginative seizure (clairvoyance), storying, song, breath. By the vicissitudes of listening.

This profound listening in the interior, the radical interior; or an equally profound listening in
the face of an other’s words.

Which may be the interlocuted Same.

To inter-locute: as in two or more entities involved in circuits, among circuits.

Is the voice a circuit?

*to Eliza Newman-Saul