Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Children of Men (*Charis*)


The ontological import of this axiom is clear: the decomposition of a multiplicity always includes a *halting point*. At a given moment, you will come upon an element of the multiplicity whose own composition no longer belongs to this multiplicity. In other words: there is no infinite descent into the constituents of a multiplicity.... The existence of such a halting point stabilizes every multiplicity upon itself, and guarantees that in one point at least it encounters something that is no longer itself.
~ Alain Badiou

Faith and chance dance
In the lone Infinite's eyes
The singular infant's eyes
And the eyes of those soldiers born
Where they lay down their eventual arms

*Charis* or Grace what is this
Force that is not force
*Shante Shante Shante* towns
And compounds pounding
Refugees their sudden and
Unsurpassed truths?

What is this uncertain ship
We each long for TOMORROW
Which appears but never arrives?


We are all falling then
and write our names in these waves.

We are all falling to our graves
but rising from extension.

While intensity is this child
what should we call her?

What is our name
if not "the one from the one"?


Except life-forms
Faith and Chance play
In our eyes again
And their false eyes
The truth of Chance
Is beaten to a pulp
By Necessity


This counts (it counts
and counts) this subtraction
counts (and counts)
and counts (hold me for
the time being
time being this eventfulness


The held infant holds us in this event
The infant holds us in this in this
Event the infant held the infant cradled holds us in
This event
Beholden as such--


It holds us and we drop...

Our guns we drop | our guns the infant
Holding us and mute | the start and stutter
We drop our guns | we are not

Crying | in this event we | are not crying in
This event we are | not crying we are
Shedding ourselves | we are shedding we

Are subtracting | our selves from this event
We singletons and cells | and children with
Deeper | eyes we are subtracting | we are

The event of this | subtraction this event
Is a subtraction | for which we are
And we drop | our guns and

We drop our guns...

We will not cry for this
We will not shed a single one


It matters this tear
Like a beam in the eyes confused
With sunshine or another light

Of first things priorities without
Artillery "his argosies"
Before this sudden test like knights become

Benighted invincible and grasped
By percept sky falls from sky
Shells rise and touch their aftermath

In the place we will not be when the walls fall
*Charis* will only be cell will be
Cell and soon and not soon enough


Journalists of ought and not
Hardly save this night
The will is a zipper
At the end of every plan

Civilization is stone cold
Called adrift to global loaves
Incommensurable like all
Truth what won't be spared

Must remain
Like a call on the other line
Of other lives or like tears
Frozen in time.


This movie is instructive
Of revolution because there
Will be no revelation such as
We plan it it's not as they
Say just that the revolution
Will not be televised it
Will be realized only through
That number that is not numerical
The bullet holes and the shrapnel
Like a music missing us
We are humiliated but then
We are also heard

That is I am interested in
The old dyad Faith and Chance
Makes *Charis* or Grace
Is the place we go when
There is no place left
To arrive and only occur
May say our names like
A cry distantly heard
Through a variant like a fated
Infant women men are then
Their own mothers irreproducible
More original than any cast


Red is a flavor
And blue a waste
That smothers sunlight
And converts us rivallingly

White like heat is not
Sighted or cited to
A blankety something
An everything as were

The words we're stuck with
They compose a library here
And not in the sky a system
Of numbers as arbitrary

As anything elsewhere
We care to call this "scattering towards"
What stacks recall us better
Delimiting Infinity in fact.


I want to grasp
That flower too
That is not her
Then ungrasp it

Like it were me
And not her
Who can see
Everything and hear

The crows just beyond
This line the sure
Beams their eyes
Are shined with

Just before they die
In the hunt but don't really
Because as soon
As we're grasped we're not.


For "not" and not "sometimes"
For "sometimes" and not "somewhere"
Some signs for flight for flight
Is a swerve from Void and matters

Clinamen and Fold--lo and behold!

For "yes" and not "on high"
For "here" and not "sweet-hereafter"
For missed targets and not the real
Politics of corrupted belief.

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