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

Bresson's Saints (Notes)

Bresson's characters are ideas, if not modernized archetypes; there is not psychological identification with them, as in action driven plots, but certain ideational-emotional investment (as in great metaphysical theater: Shakespeare, Stein, Beckett, Foreman).

The interior lives of Bresson's characters are exteriorized making for a purer interiority, an interiority of surface, and in this way they are both like animals and saints: animals incapable of a knowable interior life; saints praying towards an interior limit which produces the outward appearance of grace -- demonstrations of graceful demeanor and speech, perfect emotion.

As in Stein's saints, the saintly (including her saintly words) should move as little as possible (the words of serial?), grace being a quickness in calm (Badiou's dancer after Nietzsche who is fast because they conceive the world slowly, deliberately). In constant prayer (their lives of prayer) the saint is a dancer making grace visible by a rigorous interior life. This depth of ontological interior is not of psychological perception, but rather a depersonalized depth of shared voice / mind in prayer (immediate or direct reflection).

Someone once told me that Chris Marker had written one typically taciturn sentence addressing Bresson's work: the gist of the remark, as I remember it, that a single frame of any of Bresson's films contained more significance than the majority of films taken in their entirety. I take this as a comment on the perfection of Bresson's craft as an artist, but also as addressing the saintliness of Bresson's films. For the significance or saintliness of each frame derives not only from an economy of dialogue and action made possible by careful editing and cinematography, but also an economy of character. In using models and non-professional actors Bresson probably did so to capture the interior limits of the saintly by its inverse: the radical emptiness and pure objecthood of the non-actor / model completely directed, or chosen by the director for their appearance and disposition to certain movements and expressions.

Prayers Not Yet

I. “Everything is moving me up”

Is not yet an angel
Is an angel
Not yet
To forget what time isn’t
What musn’t
Be again
Fatefully our immanence
Our innocence
The tents
Of neutral voice into which

On our soft watch
We intuit
What gravity won’t heed
Nor heal
On our soft watch
We invisibly see
Those miles of forced wildness
What grace
Gravity won’t
Be heir to
What storming what hearing
And promised voice

Not of their imperial knack
We seek in trembling lack
Stock branches a trembling
Night for the voice an ear
To accompany a voiding air
Eye breeze and not snow no longer
Trembling branches as such

This time of year to continue with
Our name not yet an angel-name-event
In situ redemptions frozen into
Face retreated from glory grace

Not saved again to
The power two
To the one two
Effulgent percept
Fragrant cinematics
And invisibles

The guilt of our innocence
Guilt of our excess guilt
Of our individuation guilt
Of our ignorance to the power of two
Misidentified in a penitent pose

Pose adepts not this dance again
Exegesis Corbin not yet to clock Descartes’s Plato
To move the motion
Pictures up
To move infinite
Only poetry finds an
Angel again to move in perfect motion
Name not yet an image

Not yet an event supplicant in dance
This infinite dance to not continue
Without woe
Invisibly to continue
In this infinitely not contingent must
Is a surpassed world
Your pretended body

Is the voice trembling
In the dark is not
The voice is not anyone’s
Voice
In particular
Is no body
Obscuring a punctured
And punctual light
It is to suddenly be
Here

II. For the Cycles

Where space begins suddenly
In time and presupposes our love
For the worlds (the world) what image will you
Make
Will one make
So neutral to think
The voice
A delay shapes

Delayed shapes suddenly here
And not here
Not yet to shore
The body up
Not the erotic
Mind you occult
By drinking up ink
A scholastic problem of love

Delaying future shapes
Of a certain bow
Of an angel struggling
In potentia with
A certain bow
Circular to sing

The inside before his breath is done
Before light light falsely
Catches up

A retard
To light
Catches up
To words
An allegory of their fall

And not a fall
Serials
From light evening light

Night / Light
Not a fall

As light so literal
An angel in actuality
Kept by its words

III. The Presentable, for Nancy Spero

So withdrawn
Were
Their words as
Screaming
As such this
Time of year (every time
Of year
Everywhere
And for the general)
For the particular
Spero
Pictures of
Copters are
For the destroying
For
The destroyed
Women paint
Stone-like
Inscriptions
Art must exist
To produce knowledge.

We speak soliloquies
Our prayers
And apostrophes
Of the one
For the two
The one and one
Not making
Merely two (Creeley)
Not equal
In numericity
Our daily voices
Our images
Of the voice nations are
Hallucinated
(his Later numbers).

Nancy Spero
For what
We see and
Don’t see
The blood for
The trees
The dark
Of lovers for what
We see to not see
The dark
Of bodies
In pain
Ruptures from
Existence
Torturously must be
Presented

IV.

To move for all
In perfect motion culture
Of our fall
And our repeated
Resurrections, who
Will forgive
The fallen-risen
Who shelter ink and image

Those who flock
Those who kill
Of the one for
The two
The two
Of forgetting
Those who flock
Those who will
The graphics of a cloud
Loving only the difference

A different delay
Her body
Of letters and
Her body of substance
Circling the onus
Of time
Her material
Body the retard
Of perfect naming

Delayed
And suddenly
Shudder shiver
For the one (the One)
Of value
Eternal are the
Names
Of flux in this
Dance, perfect
Image of our regard

Is to partake
Of images
Letters
Of which
To partake
Not-yet
Of the body
Of the soul hiding

V. Coda (Prayer Wheel)

Devoid delaying
Lacrimose injunction
Imageless motion
More than branch
Voicelessly

Wild Horses Of Fire*

The light
Thru the trees
This camera tracks

Their faces
The trees of
Their youth
Say

Naked
My earth
Is virtuous
The capillary
Lights

The shot tracking
Their youth
Thru the trees

Light facing
A sky
Their bodies say

*

They who sing
Each other’s names
To marry the capillary
Contact of a star
Too close and bright

Too loaded by
Blood
Of days their names sing
Calling
Across vast pasture
Futures of sleeping stars

A sheep they slap
Presages let
Their ancestries shade the delight
Of parting in rain
In saying the name
Recall for me
How floes show forth

*

With noise in their week
Sex changes the pink
Sky's chime of light
Their blood like two
Titles beat

Blowing rings around gongs
The noise of coffin nails
Upon new hooves

*

Bloodletting a word
Sink from roofs
Beads in a netting
Of frank lace

Of our fortunate turns
Weeping is this collection

"The truth
may be sad,"
after all.

"We were searching
for ourselves
in each other."

*

Going by the roadside
With large hips
My star

Going by rain
Thru the years of these hills
To shepherd our deaths
Our lives need shepherding

Going by fire
By black fire
And swaying pages
And shadow
The door swings
Towards floes once past

In a courtyard
The distant
Hills of these years
The heads of babes
Almost touching
The good

Fallen from the sky
We arrive lately
From rain and wind wounds
To the bodies of
Our beloved
Documented by ice

Torch don't forget
A footstep
Don't forget to forget
What fire
Singularly veils

*

The corporeal
Hiding in our dress
Our dress of more
In our waking work
The camera's vanished
The blind so bedecked

So bejeweled
The corporeal
Our dress of more
Unripened cloaks
Veils, nights clock us
Shape tucks us in

The white unripening
Of groves long nights
Sex gone from the fact
That we are

That we are gone
And ambidexterous
Hiding in our dress
Garment unripened
By flickering rice

*

Bright bright travel
The face escapes
To tell the line, to tell this lie
To trade in visions
Signs of the bodily
Beaded pink,
Created black

The face escapes
This too is good
Travelling these hills
To emote a sound of whips
A lonesome sound at that
Opens

To tell the lie, to tellingly
Align
This too is good
With cameras we work
Down to earth
I believe this music of the deaf
The fruits of the dead

Travelling these hills
To trade in visions
With cameras we work
To repeat is not
To reproduce
It is to remember to burn

*composed Spring 2004. Revised 12/19/05

Meatyard, my neighbor*

23.
Nor will I sow joints.

Joints of flesh, joints of
wood
what wainscot cites.

Nor will I reap
enfeebled bones.


24.
A joy!

A joy to bake on the rock of Lazarus!

Living being a free-fall.


26.
There are holes
in the sky
almost like clouds.

The clouds of hell
I command
clandestine young thing
of flame and wing

we must be
subterranean,
our verses must
and unbind
many points in space.

These holes weren’t
punched by logic,
yet we can’t deny
they are there.

And we are here…
our arms make
penumbral the
presuppositions
of a time-based world.

There is
a difference between
a sky light
and a radiant hole.

Since one day
we will fly
flung by
our tearfulness.


27.
I sing thee two exposures, three masks of leaves.
For eternity, this motion waits on our poses (rounds of choice appear)

Tree of appearance, tree of barren knowledge
These free-falls know no expression.
A depth of field yields terminal views.


28 / 29.
Torsion a
pony

-tail whips rigor

mortis
of motion.


Torsion a ponytail

whips rigor mortis

of motion.


30.
Freeze frame of
the frozen retinal

“The mind”
breaks sound
barrier of these branches

Each one a false view of the thing.

No more do we hear
rational
in pastoral

than we touch
logos in ghosts

Seeing them for the trees

dark “beams” a mind
of black & white

breaks barrier of sight.


30.
The fly
a
buzz
in my iris.

A shaft
stuffed
in astral
ears.


34.
Only sometimes does death choose us.
Only sometimes breath


39.
A hazy absolute

a/k/a: the “all all”,
a/k/a : “the the”.

No such Elysian (But as the eyes have it)

The eye grows hazy
not wanting

once more to give up the world,

the “real world” again.


44.
Kiss me

I am young and
not young.

You are faceless.
Your total back

gives me the face.


49.
A little tear in the eye.

My thesis sticks to light.

It tells us nothing
of where we are looking
or where we are

(these dark
room ontologies, these bad
brains).

Tear the foreground first

then remember

a sliver of light motion misapprehends.


55.
Bardo is my business.

No kidding

Don’t be afraid of losing your invisible limbs (spectral analytic).

There are still solid things to guide you, material to purchase.

Where to start?

Not being a real boy.

New organs are new notions.


56.
This dream-state of erasing and erasing
(if it is a dream-state at all)
can no longer hurt you.

These leaves have grown up with us.

We take full responsibility for the bite-marks.


56.
Autopsy of an x-ray.


59.
What the fuck?

Why is the world so heavy,
and me so light.

My so called solid hands.


60.
This is
the moment
of lightness
I live for

(discontinuously dying to live).

Alighting –
the wings of
the world

gazing
through each instance,
each instance gazes
through you.

Dear view finder…
Who is an angel NOT of history?


62.
Would it be rude to peer into my tongueless mouth the absolute?


68.
Mutants, we are all pure forms of maternity.

Cathedrals and
camera

obscuras

her hair
aglow.

Not quite an apocalypse.


68.
This umbilical kiss.
The light no longer can conceal.
That unacknowledged world.
Hush now, Plato.


85.
Craving a plausible
shape for the dead and not
in fact a voice.

What were you expecting?

Night is quick to rise and
covers the obelisk

Secrecy being
the first form power takes.

Plotting your return to the living
what is it you see

more curious than frightening?


86.
These mannerist endgames

(we play anyway).

The game of pastoral, columns, perspective (

prospective surds
)

(Nor were these cities ruined in a day.)

Thin wires
(optical chiasm) chiasmus

strip sense of thing.


88.
A white wall may be the world's end.

For Melville.

Overwhelming pictures.


101.
Ill Cyclops, my filament?

How can you just float there

like that.

Always a light
source, never
a god.

There will be no words for what you dream

(random sound-image).

No worldly
eyes for the transmigratory.


114.
You dig.

I dig.

This blur.

*composed September-November '05. To Brandon Stosuy.

Does matter have eyes? (towards Smithson)

Does matter have eyes?

Is there a vision of matter, that belongs to matter its self?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his late MS., *The Visible and the Invisible*, recognizes that all matter, organic and inorganic, sees, and that the "subject" so-called is located in relation to this inordinate, ongoing gazing.

The subject is only a subject as it gazes and is gazed at, and partakes of a common gaze that is the gaze of the created, Univocal or 'General Being'.

This mutual gaze of 'General Being', the gaze of all emergence, is neutral, true in and of itself, a universal form of power or power dispersed (& Foucault may recognize such an ideal economy of power in Benthem's project for a Panopticon)

What I am concerned with after Merleau-Ponty is a radical mutuality of the gaze extended to the sensorium in its relation to nervous system / mind, a mutality called 'General Being' and recognized in 'chiasmic' relation. Interpenetrating, intussuceptive -- however both terms seem inadequate, not radical enough. The best image of chiasmus may not be an image at all; but pre-cognized (ek-cognized?) by the one who, touching their self, loses the self at an edge where the self as thing and as reflective consciousness blend indefinitely. The result is a blindness. The blank of simulatenously cognizing the sensible and insensible in one other.

In this mutuality all beings emerge and exist, being for and in themselves. "Subject" / "Object" radicalized beyond cognition. Can we imagine this mutuality comprising a film; a total film, a view of all views, that can never be seen except in some never realized eternity? Which are yet, practically, for the purposes of memory and action, always present... Virtually present?

*composed September '05

"Art is ethics by other means" (review)

This past Thursday, Dec. 8th I attended an event at PS1 celebrating the recent “visual issue” of The Believer. Here is a cross-section of a review I started writing:

Leading up to Matthew Ronay and Brandon Stosuy’s live “interview,” Eric Fischl extemporized on the “death of painting,” beginning with the observation: Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and made a self-portrait of himself afterwards and the painting was considered art; approximately a century later Chris Burden had an assistant shoot him in the arm with a rifle and this action, and not its “documents” and reliquaries, was instead considered the work of art. Throughout his presentation, Fischl proceeded largely by surveying particular sculptural and painted works and considering an evolution of painting and sculpture towards their dematerialization (or “death,” as he referred to it) and works after. Where I thought Fischl was connecting some interesting dots, he seemed careful or unwilling to draw conclusions during his talk, putting forward instead questions and conjectures that “interested” him.

Fischl concluded his presentation with some remarks about the current “state of art” (and NYC-based visual art in particular) post 9/11. His moralizing finale was both traumatic and pedestrian: artists failed to respond adequately to 9/11, to take “action” through their work, and this failure represents a "paradigmatic shift" in art’s claim to a moral and/or political efficacy. In response to Fischl’s conclusion the artist and self-proclaimed "amateur materialist” sitting beside me, Eliza Newman-Saul, conveyed a more radical conclusion, one that may go productively against the grain (and the refrains) of ongoing assessments of that “disaster”: that merely siting a “paradigmatic change” after 9/11 obviates the critical imperative to investigate the event’s historicity, and History itself as both a synchronous and diachronous procession. Or, in other words, that there is in fact no “paradigmatic change” nor necessarily an “event character” about 9/11 in its relation to “art,” but only, perhaps, what Barrett Watten calls "bad history": history traumatically cathected by the dialectical “blindspots" and "traumatic kernels" of a truth content neither arbitrarily unprecedented or absolutely discontinuous.

Where Fischl presented a moral response to art after 9/11, coincidentally Ronay / Stosuy presented what I took to be an ethical or ethological one. So much depends upon the distinction. Beginning with clips of football injuries in which one could see knees fully dislocated from their joints and legs hanging from their ligaments, Ronay proceeded mainly to address his own work after 9/11. His conclusion: artists tended to “internalize” the event and in turn responded by making work around problems of “death,” “sexuality,” and “the body”. As Ronay admitted, these are problems of “existential” concern; but they are also “ethological” ones insofar as they investigate “what a body can do” (Spinoza) and what one is capable of believing in (Deleuze’s Philosophy should give us something in which to believe qua Art should give us something to believe in). As Stosuy fed Ronay leading questions, the artist continued to ponder “love” and “hedonism” during a time of “empire”. Should not love have to account for, even provide for, “anal cupcake beads” -- the artist cunningly asked. Ronay’s work, a work I have only recently become familiar with, seems to present questions concerning the production of bodies in relation to a cultural “imagination” and a “real” both radically profaned and spiritualized. This chiasmus of the imaginary and the real may account for a work of Ronay’s in which one sees the plastic representation of a dog’s backside observing the dog’s genitals to be in the shape of a young girl’s. Ronay’s world thus seems a plastic one in which actuality has given way to the "virtual" in a material form.

If not for Fischl’s moral claims after 9/11, I could see the artist struggling to make a point similar to Ronay's in his presentation, where his constellation of 20th century works of art culminated with pics of Paul McCarthy’s own cartoonish sculptural monstrosities, and the haunting flockings of the Chapman Bros. sexualized and ambigendered children: that the flip-side of events like the torture of prisoners at Abu Gahib -- and ultimate degradation of the body torture always entails -- is an ongoing proliferation of hellish and disorganizied bodies in the "American"-Western imagination. If we can make a basic distinction between morality and ethics we might say that morality attends the “ideal” while ethics does the dyad “real” / "unreal" – the fluctuating conditions of bodies, of relations and fields of force.

The scene of Ronay / Stosuy unflinchingly encountering pornography, pedophilia and extreme bodily states presents the problem of the “real” where moral prescription a la “artists should have done something else after 9/11” will continue to fail. Never is there the moral imperative of “something else” (not even after the most despicable acts of humanity to which, I might add, 9/11 can hardly compare) but only historical consciousness always trying to keep pace with events in the world and tragically lagging behind (or retrospectively pressuposing them, as the case may also be). The final irony of Fischl’s talk may then be his devotion to the sensitivities of artists, which makes me think that it is not the individuated artist who fails, but the society of which she partakes. Art is ethics by other means insofar as the artist may present the problem of this failure and a culture may struggle to participate in this presentation and make conscious to itself what is being presented.

The final presentation of the evening was given by artist Cory Archangel. Archangel’s performance may serve as a kind of third party to Fischl and Ronay / Stosuy, where I have always found the artist to chase his timely critiques of art trends in relation to electronic culture with an endearing and effective showmanship.

My first glimpses of this crucial balancing act in Archangel’s work were taken when I knew him as a student at Oberlin College. In addition to presenting numerous videos and tape pieces with his collaborator, Paul Davis, during their junior recital in Oberlin’s music conservatory, Archangel concluded the recital with a simple yet radical lesson. Using an obsolete Apple software called Lisa, and addressing his audience thru a “real-time” video feed, Archangel revealed the software’s coding to the audience. He proceeded to explain how binary code works to encode information -- and specifically information pertaining to licensing and copying permission -- and, for his final trick, pointed to a particular moment in Lisa's code where one could turn the copy protection on or off.

The activism and didacticism lurking behind Archangel’s deceptively self-evident projects were pervasive during the period we overlapped at Oberlin (1996-1999), and especially among a group of students actively investigating questions of emerging media: Archangel, Jacob Ciocci (Paper Rad), Jen Liu, Laboratory Theater and Ray Sweeten to name just a few. I found the spirit of these investigations to be in full effect the other night as Archangel performed the not-so-simple (as we were all too learn) action of closing his Friendster account (and thus, in his words, committing online “suicide”).

What struck me again was how a relatively routine action could become an important object lesson in the pragmatics and metaphysics of electronic media in Archangel’s hands. If there is a trick to Archangel’s didactic performances it is likely the very opposite of the one used by con men in the three card monty, where the artist's conceit is not in making the card appear where it did not seem to be, but in revealing that which we imperiously keep track of but so often can not recognize in its value and significance. Artists often talk about their work as being “participatory” or “democratic”; Archangel’s art is genuinely participatory and popular where the majority of art that intends participation and democratic-populism fails. The evidence is not in the show of hands from his audience or a gratuitous Q&A, but in his audience’s frequent shouting out of instructions about how to use technologies constitutive of their common experience. It is in recognition, a recognition that goes back to an ancient "state of the art": that we use technology, but that technology also uses us; and this mutual using reflects real conditions of experience and appearance.

After countless interruptions, technical difficulties, digressions, shaggy-dog stories and witty banter the actual moment of deletion was once more prolonged by a survey requesting Archangel’s reason for deleting his account. To which he typed (not without typos and excessive exclamations marks): “the advancement of artistic performance”. Indeed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

3 after Bresson*

Vicious Circles (Bresson)
with Gregg Biglieri

Love cannot exist between people
-- Jack Spicer

as the tremendous volume of the music
takes over obscured by their long hair
they seem to be mourning
-- George Oppen

1.
Children again
Do you hear children
Again
Do you sight
Like a horse
One eye sees
This good wicked throne
Too soon
To be future too
Soon to be past
Bullets fly again and
Broken blood pumps

My love whose eye is this
Don’t
Forsake me
Community
Round round
Community
For the trees with
Bright flags we go

For the darkness of love
Love
The dark forest
No justice just don’t kill
The king yet
Like a vicious carousel
The horses go round

A round a round community
With nowhere to go
A forest fossilizes
With bright flags and sharp
Tongues and lances
We go
This justice this
Justice perhaps
The trees for the forest

Camera attests
The torso simply framed
A lovely
And brute objecthood
With dark hearts we go
In love where the camera
Cares to wait

Horse whose eye is this
To risk
Don’t forsake me
Roundness the thing is
A universe
Bright camera with a mind
Of its own
Mind of the eye

Lovely a brute dark kiss
Kiss me
I battle to risk
With mind’s bright swords
Swiftly we go
Justice is
Eye’s apocalypse

Blindful injustice
The round community without
Head
Brain needs eyes like
A hole to risk
This bright lance
Love’s body
For the trees

The trees for bloody
Community
A
Bloody pile all these
Horses
All these flags go
For the headless
I am afraid eyes need brains
I am
Afraid I
Love you so

2.
Free radicals children
With a bullet graze
This grassy open
Do sheep gather to shepherd
This thought of death?

Because this time is corrupt
Because
A human community is lacking turn
The other cheek
Kill
While no one is watching
No kid too bold

None are guilty enough
None guilty
Enough to love
To hate to love them
All protect
Nothing
Sheep gather at
The end of this

Roll to our own death
Happily bundle
There is no cold so cold as this
To love to hate to love
This generous violence
A world of mud

I fling no child
Left behind
No kid too bold
Don’t kiss me
Not cruel enough to be
A real beauty
We fall dead at the end
Of any noble thought
This opening

Because they will always
Be corrupt
Because
They will always presume
Their guilt is not free enough
There is no cold so cold
As cauterizing

3.
The wind bloweth
O my breath
Our breasts the lisp of little
And wicked things
Things
Wicked in their thing-ness

The eyes of animals follow
My breath
A wicked thesis
Saintly judgement
Bullets blow
Over this hill how pastoral

Without morality without
Conscience
The wind bloweth with an inhuman will
To escape disaster
Saintly eyes follow
The gazes of other animals
And children without

Morality they
Are wicked children
The camera finds the place
From which no one looks
In the rearview
Of a bus
In the eyes the eyes
Of a blameless beast

Sing sweetly and long
For that ass
The wind bloweth where it listeth
That gaze will survive
Sheep and rape
Bottles broken over the tain

*composed spring-summer 05. Thanks to Gregg Biglieri who offered suggestions for revision.

Cruelty (an analogy)

Cruelty is to nobility

as meanness
is to

bourgeois
subjectivity and other

drudgerous levels
of "selfhood"

...where nobility = aristocracy
of the will

and drama
of intensified thinking.

Thinking

at the level

of drive?

The thots very much
of children
and
"psychotic" / imaginative
adulthoods?

"the world / is a stage but we are too"

The awaited bombs,
the mounds of skulls,
the Kalashnikov guns,
the infant dressed for fame,
they are all now too
not that they would admit it

The awaited bombs,
the appointed coordinates,
the fake blood,
the real blood,
the recreation
of the whole world
by non-mastery

This is the guilt
the blood by guilt
of the vicious and uneven
circle
never touched

Upon except
at its edges and least
coherent points
the places
from which one
talks distractedly

The martyrologies,
the hagiographies,
those who cathect
the world not yet
lost
lost already
to not be lost yet

A terminal world
of discomfort I want
to love them all, but I can’t
think of a single name,
not a single shelter
or point commensurable
for naming itself

The names of histories
and actions
until it is too late…
a serial of late commas,
of commas arriving
too late in premeditation

Another “avant-garde”
acting forgotten until
it was too late these words
of apostrophe and asides
and interior chatter, the world
is a stage but we are too

Perhaps your insomniacs
dream of action,
perhaps a world or worlds far beyond
any point of being woken
so surpassed are they
by the senseless

The actions performed
out of concern
for free-fall and dance,
the “floating leaps” again,
the vertiginous precisions,
cuts and points which must
be finally of this dance

Are the unnamable points
of action, are
actions taken
because there is not
sleep
and only the non-
ability to be vigilant

The unnameable
points
where we find each other again,
an image
before an image
in abeyance of unmitigatable ambivalence,
possession not to be possessed

Thoughts then make
these gestures with the hand
somnolently of what
the bouncing and faceted
body can do

You take them to sleep with you.

The Ambivalent Image

Deren's final image of a woman 'suicided' in Meshes of the Afternoon is an ambivalent image. It is, what's more, an ambivalent image FOR other images ambivalent or not. In this case, it is an image radicalizing a situation of 'understanding' (accreting coherence in disjuncture) a woman's action or impulsion to kill herself. For other ambivalent and non-ambivalent images in my attention, Deren's image supplements against a finally coherent stucture (an understanding) for the desperate women of Palestine and elsewhere whether actually suicided or not.

This first image of a woman suicided is supplemented by another ambivalent image from her film: that of a woman's legs in profile stepping across four spatially (if not temporally) discrete terrains by means of film editing (cuts); as Deren herself tells us, this image is intended to present a woman walking across eternity to initialize the first ('primeval') in the last ('killing one's self') of a (recurrent, aleatory) series.

The ambivalence of this second image may be said to supplement that of the first insofar as it raises the dual specters of religious belief and contemporary scientific-philosophical consideration for immortality / resurrection. Can we use the ambivalence of these images to accrete a disjunctive coherence of the present crisis of belief as it is linked to "liberation" struggles and "fundamentalist"-materialist power plays alike (Bush Admin. preempting and augmenting [conjuring?]ubiquitous 'terrorist' threats for territorial advantage and control of natural resources)?

There is an elaborate (and kitschy) iconography / hagiography that glorifies one's decision to take their life and the lives of an enemy population in the current Islamic world. Videos of "martyrs" typically w/ Kalashnikovs, air-brushed wall posters, public service announcements / TV commercials honoring "suicide bombers," "martyr's picture goes here"-esque plaques, children's cartoons. Yet something rings false in an assumption that such an iconography would be merely enough to lend belief supportive of a will to die. The images from Deren's film lead me to this final ambivalence: that the situation in Palestine seems a kind of 'perfect storm' whose unaccounted variable is an uncanny and widespread willingness to die, a willingness that it is difficult to believe is the result of humiliation, material deprivation and effective ideology / propaganda alone.

Meshes (notes, discursus)

Motor co-ordination (or lack thereof) of Deren's figure (in dream). This is a film abt. dream experiences, a descent into Bergson's virtual as it is made / becomes actual, as dream images become actualized, “triggered” or “thrown up” as such: "And it may occur that, of an afternoon, these restive captives of memory – refreshed by new contexts and released by the lax discipline of sleep – may triumphantly regain the province of actuality."*

It is also a Bardo (taking my lead from Toufic's work on film)... a film form for reincarnation, recurrent resurrection (eternal return), where through / upon / within dream Deren's figure is reborn (dream within dream within dream) and dies (or is, rather, ‘suicided’? / substituted by her lover)

So the end does not feel like an "end" proper, the one to which all good “psychological” dramas lead (and as much of Deren's writing shows (cf. "Magic is New") she was constantly struggling to describe an "experimental" cinema against "psychological," action-driven narrative film), but as Deren demonstrates by her bifurcating "narrative" structure only a possible end, one of many ends.

One can imagine the multiple lives / moments of Meshes’ protagonist through a continuous film sequence / montage -- both the life in which she commits suicide / is suicided and that of other percepts, movements, emotions etc. As in dream experience we should not assume any of these moments are of a continuous identity, life or body... but of an accreted body coherent only in multiplicity and discontinuity.

Deren's woman is a sleepwalker, a sonambulist for whom the (cinematic) world is an objective "people mover" conveying her up stairs, providing wind-sources, creating the illusion she is being thrown about by camera movement... Her movements become necessary, or necessity's opposite -- where the will / effort is not active but the person is acted upon.

Aleatory in resentiment? Reactive? Should one be said to be reactive in all dream states insofar as they are felt involuntarily and not ‘re-acted’? "As a result of his type the man of ressentiment does not 'react': his reaction is endless, it is felt instead of being acted."**

What may complicate a reading of Deren’s figure in Meshes of the Afternoon as a figure of ressentiment (among other things) is Deren’s own commitments to dance as well as her crucial move towards the “dance film” after Meshes. We might even say that Meshes is already a dance film, or at least a film about movement, insofar as it describes a woman moving as a body within spaces, and amidst objects and people by the particular “magic” of montage, camera work and special effects creative of “unreal” spatial and temporal configurations.

In lieu of Nietzsche’s privileging of dance as a “metaphor for thought” (Badiou)*** and as a primary image of “eternal return,” can we view Deren’s films after Meshes as a resurrection / reincarnation of the body ‘suicided’ in Meshes's final scene?

It is interesting to read Deren’s descriptions of her films as a series. Typically, the filmmaker reserves Meshes as a first effort nevertheless significant, but not as important to her as later films; she also reserves Meshes as a film about “emotional” complexity. Deren’s next film, At Land, she claims to be ostensibly “about” stable identity in changing environments, and the films afterward to address specific problems of dance: “Choreography for Camera” how camera / editing will be part of the dance; “Ritual in Transfigured Time” how a “widow” can become a “bride,” things their transfigured (substantiated?) inverses; Meditation on Violence presents a furthering of the problem of the camera person / editor / filmmaker participant in the dance, how camera itself dances, as well as the sense of dance coming from “unconstrained interiority” (Badiou); her last film before Divine Horsemen, The Very Eye of Night, I read as addressing a dance beyond interiority and intersubjectivity towards the cosmic (unconstrained exterior).

The last move of Deren’s shortlived career is obviously towards experimental and participatory ethnography, where the move towards exterior is thrown back on interior thru moments of possession, possession being a meeting between immortal exterior and interior human in the mortal body of the human being. Seeing Divine one is reminded, finally, that Deren’s main concern is with movement, and how the camera and editing can give appropriate form to the singular psychotic-hysterical moment of possession (the body “jerking” about, the wide eyes tending to roll back).

As with the case of other artists who “died young” (on time?) one wonders where else there was for Deren to go, possession seeming a telos for the movements of her films about movement… or a coming full circle insofar as her primordial image, her primitive scene, may be the “signature” shot from Meshes of a woman’s leg stepping by means of cuts across four different terrains (beach, asphalt road, carpeted room, lawn with tall grass), and this movement by cut constitutes a movement across eternity to kill oneself the very inverse of genetic coming-to-be (where in genetic survival one has “beat the odds” to live, here one has beat the same odds to die).

The move that concerns me in the film, and that I imagine may trouble “feminist” film critics is that from the bedroom where the woman confronts her lover, to the objective shot where we find the woman dead, broken glass surrounding her on the floor. In the bedroom scene, Deren’s woman of course draws a knife on her male counterpart only to discover him an image (photogram), and to shatter the image as though it were a mirror. It is the glass of this broken photogram that we see collecting on the shores of a beach in the next scene, and in the scene after that piled at the feet of the dead woman. A psuedo-psychoanalytic reading of this scenario may have it that Deren has displaced the object of her murderous aggression / desire (her male counterpart) upon her self; in Nietzsche, such an interiorizing displacement of drives, may be read as an instance of ressentiment, where that which is re-feeling is that unwilling to “re-act,” to express feelings actively towards a present verticality of eternity, to express towards forgetting where forgetting is a means of “health” or joy, a moment decided and divided (bifurcating) in eternal return.

The final image of Meshes, I read as deeply ambivalent. It is an image that fortuitously presents itself to me as I have been reading about the situation of women “suicide bombers” / “martyrs” in Palestine and elsewhere. If journalist Barbara Victor is correct in her assessment of the four women martyrs she discusses in her book, Army of Roses, these women are the victims of a double-bind, whereby to not act as “martyrs” they forego the same rights / honors as their male counterparts in a society in which women struggle for gender equality; on the other hand, Victor makes the case that the women she discusses martyr themselves in last resort to find exonerated “ways out” from limited social roles. Are these women not “suicided” then in the sense that Artaud uses the term to discuss Van Gogh's death? The gramatically awkward term “suicided” presents an impasse: that what would seem to be an act committed by a self of agency is in fact committed by that self as the agent of larger social desires and mores. In this case, the general desire (or particular, insofar as it may be that of a privileged authoritative leadership or hierarchial belief-structure) both to defeat a collective enemy (Israel and collaborators / supporters) while also to maintain conservative social values. To suicide someone, as in the case of Van Gogh, is to direct the energies of self against the self, and for such a direction of energy – of drives and emotions – to end up destroying that self, "self-destructing". This suiciding direction of energy may describe the “emotional complex” of Deren’s protagonist in Meshes; it may also belong to the case of women not allowed to “re-act,” to “move,” or to “dance” insofar as they belong to a culture utterly humiliated by an enemy, and which would use this humiliation as a means of regulating desires and values.

An ambivalence about the position of Palestinian women lingers for me in Deren’s description of her own figure having to pass through all of time to kill herself: “What I meant when I planned that four stride sequence was that you have to come a long way – from the very beginning of time – to kill yourself, like the first life emerging from the primeval waters.”**** Such a suicide is a joy not the opposite but inverse of the joy to live. If Nietzchse’s ethics is founded on “dice throws” in eternal recurrence, that an individual should act as if that action should be committed for all time, and that to make decisions, as such, is to affirm aleatory-becoming as the only means of being; then can one not destroy themselves willfully as a dice throw, and therefore in ethical affirmation?… Such a view of suicide would seem to tread against the foundations of Western philosophy, where Spinoza’s notion of the “conative” as a being’s effort to prolong its existence indefinitely remains central, if not a priori.

*Maya Deren from a letter to James Card, April 19th, 1955
**from Deleuze's *Nietzsche & Philosophy*
***from Alain Badiou's "Dance as Metaphor for Thought" in *Handbook of Inaesthethics*
****Maya Deren, from 1960 “program notes”*

L'Ange cont'd

"Dance is innocence, because it is the body before the body."
-- Alain Badiou

A drawn out time
of pictures
are twigs of us
carried
are twigs of us carried
carry us twigs of us and milk to parry

To parry of us the forgetting
of us broken
and forgotten again
across time
broken and the almost dark
forgetting of having watched

In trance
painting is in the strokes
the strokes
of painting frozen
and stopped stopped but not broken
on a vast
desert of paint

Is us watching one climb
a case
of image is us watching
the body
move the body ascend
stairs

Is to repiece replace the body again
as image this again
of animation to ascend
the image again

This body thought it was not one to comprehend
it thought the body again
in all good hearing of image
it thought this body falling to accrete to ascend
in one tableaux in another it thought
this body again

Repeatedly of parries of twigs it thought
the burden of seeing again
of enduring these tours of the dark

I am not one for spilt
milk I am
not not one split for split pictures
I am not one for
the whole to be broken
for the hole too broken
so I could be

The stuttered body
picture a thought
for stuttering
the whole of a falling
light a failing
light

I am not for the composited split the deposited split
I am a light source again stuttered
and falling through a painted source

Which is light for now

I am not for not spilt milk
I am the paintedness
the stop and start of this hellish
body the body we remember
to intend

I am only an instrument
a light box when I want
to be a sky
as it rolls over and darkens a sky
of bluest paint

I am part of the fallen
I am of the risen again
the risen discretely I am
an image of paint departing
from light sources uncertain

These are the holes we make in hellish dark to descend to rise to descend again

This is

The body
we remember
to attend
I am a reason for this line
of dark the line
of light
diagonals break
the dark
of climbing
figures I am merely
a picture
an image recapitulated
of the body

We remember
to resuscitate and
break
setting into motion
flight of burden
flight of of and twigs to be
resurrected and descend again
on projected wings

I will not be split milk and I will
not be entirely a light
accreted by these sensed figures I am

Riven into the light
dawns draws twilight of flayed flying
I intend clouds a sense of flying
if you will make like an animate dance
histrionics are hell

Reacting the line activates a line again of light
driven risen into
no longer
a no longer to be hell

I have passed the time parried
I am
a puppetry of disjunctive
force
image parries
an angel climbs an angel again
in discernible pictures

I am a grade I am a degrading
of angel image
parried to be for the body

Reunite with the body
like film projects in a light
box to be projected
blow like that imminent
wind his wind of late day

Over time
this re-acting landscape over
and over
this insensuous
movement

The Kleistian line then dances an Antichrist
diagonal lines of stairs to descend to ascend again

A line to descend is not to decline
in grace to descend is not to decline
in grace the painted night it is to cover
night light paint to repulse these makes
these masks of paint

It is to ascend actually and weightless not unlike

...This empty yet emphatic phallus

to Chantal Akerman

The most
angelic sex
may be between
two women
(or so many more)
after the open
road of men
and after a mirror
of one's own

...This empty
yet emphatic phallus

L'Ange*

To repeat a light to
repeat
before before the stairs
ascending
stairs like a ladder
with dolls and twigs as if
a burden
a suffering of each
body like a burden
to be carried across

The locks of hair
from hell
a hell
of light (optical)
each body
image a burden
to carry child from
light boxes
situ of graven
situ of gravity

The gravity of a doll’s
hair to parry
slow
the blows to pray
to parry
stairs of breath
books reference if we
are to carry
up the stairs in disjunct
rhythm of light
up the stairs dark
an expression of expressionless
carrying

Of hair of living tableux
stand
still and rhythmic to bear
the light of light
boxes
projector exhaust
stop action of craven
light broken
light to bear

Shadow to bear
light
I am then this body
this despairing body to bear
up the stairs
of twigs where flashlight
light
won’t do us any harm
shadow not this moment shadow
light won’t do

us harm

Won’t do this moment
harm to parry
bathwater
and sex it won’t
make a difference if it is him
or if it is us
it is us carrying
the empty sex of us up

The stairs in Being’s empty
house
Being's empty
walk
of us up and
up these stairs by degree
to repeat a moment
to repeat
moment upon moment
of moment up the stairs
of light

A momentum
those stairs
of light if we repeat
enough
this is not to reflect
the empty image
the images of stairs enough the split
milk
we always carry
a feeling for split pictures
pitchers split
milk of the body
about us mounting spilt stairs

An enclosure
of light a slit
of light the falling aperture
of light
it is a burden
to carry twigs unto the whole

*after Patrick Bokanowski's *L'Ange*

Difference & Resurrection

What the eternal return expresses is this new sense of the disjunctive synthesis. It follows that the eternal return is not said of the Same (“it destroys identities”). On the contrary, it is only Same, which is said of that which differs in itself – the intense, the unequal, or the disjoint (will to power). It is indeed the Whole, which is said of that which remains unequal; it is Necessity, which is said of the fortuitous alone. It is itself univocal: univocal Being, language or silence. However, univocal Being is said of beings which are not univocal, univocal language is applied to bodies which are not univocal, “pure” silence surrounds words which are not “pure.” One could thus search in vain within the eternal return for the simplicity of a circle and the convergence of series around a center. If there is a circle, it is the circulus vitiosus deus: difference here is at the center, and the circumference is the eternal passage through the divergent series. It is an always decentered circle for an ex-centric circumference. The eternal return is indeed Coherence, but it is a coherence which does not allow my coherence, the coherence of the world and the coherence of God to subsist. The Nietzschean repetition has nothing to do with the Kierkegaardian repetition; or, more generally, repetition in the eternal return has nothing to do with the Christina repetition. For what the Christian repetition brings back, it brings back once, and only once: the wealth of Job and the child of Abraham, the resurrected body and the recovered self. There is a difference in nature between what returns “once and for all” and what returns for each and every time, or for an infinite number of times. The eternal return is indeed the Whole, but it is the Whole which is said of disjoint members or divergent series: it does not bring everything back, it does not bring about the return of that which returns but once, namely, that which aspires to recenter the circle, to render the series convergent, and to restore the self, the world, and God. In the circle of Dionysus, Christ will not return; the order of the Antichrist chases the other order away. All of that which is founded on God and makes a negative or exclusive use of the disjunction is denied and excluded by the eternal return. All of that which comes once and for all is referred back to the order of God. The phantasm of Being (eternal return) brings about the return only of simulacra (will to power as simulation). Being a coherence which does not allow mine to subsist, the eternal return is the nonsense which distributes sense into divergent series over the entire circumference of the decentered circle – for “madness is the loss of the world and of oneself in view of a knowledge with neither beginning or end.”
-- from Deleuze's The Logic of Sense