Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
ONLY SOON TO
E F
S A
I L
R L
Pierce the dawn
And twilight
D R A W N I N T O MYSELF
Inexorably
Intolerably
The sense of our hypertelic Histoire will never again be the same,
for the lies of stillborn worlds have been exposed – even if
our Histoire was finished before it ever began, it is now possible
to inscribe on my heart, on our Histoire, a new truth – that the end
was no more than a beginning, and that death and departure have no sense,
are the absence of sense,
except as rebirths in joyous non-sense
i
III
The piteous i n a d e q u a t i o n of word to world leaves me wounded; the schism marked by
but one d e a d l e t t e r, the mark of the anguish of imprisonment in language. In another
tongue the i n f i d e l i t y of words is clear – it is self-evident...
IV
What new wounds are needed
To end the ceaseless betrayal of words?
Endless words, endless stories,
Productions of a restless mind
Craving the reassurance of an enduring identity...
I slip, I fall, I lose myself in laughter and in tears
Pleading with chance
Yet she hears only my incomprehensible laughter and tears
Pleading with time
Yet his only concession is my forgetfulness of his reign
My time is not that of this world
Losing track, losing my way, my sole consolation
Fickle chance in conspiracy with implacable time
Brings me to my knees
Then bears me aloft
Beyond words... Beyond the desire to endure...
And yet...
No sooner do I catch a glimpse of what might be
I fall... into the abyss that subtends all...
I have seen the depths
And I cry
And thus betray words with wounds
Stories, with moments at the extremes of anguish
Identity, with the forgotten hours falling free
Implacable Time - you will never let me BE
Without transition, without care
Flowing free
As rivers into the ocean
As waves lost among other waves
Far off at sea
Chance, the seductive countenance
of some event, yet far off, on the horizon
...defies time and smacks me in the face.
V
A Confession in Verse
silence without respite
here a cat cries
outside my window
sometimes the auditory
traces of happiness and hope
other times, words of anger
or anguish
or...
irreparably
Again transposed
Now as though before a mirror
the cliff, the night, the heath,
the entire deserted expanse
all vanish entering this moment
Insouciant, in laugher and in tears
suspended within this moment in time
I see you now before me
There is no one with the necessary strength to withstand the tempest that I am
And thus I resign myself to a double and doubled life
Within – a tumult of passion and rage
Without – Melancholic, having lost my way in the night
Wound
Wounded we come unbound(ed), unwound
we unravel, unhinged, torn asunder at the seams
Fabric of experience rent, we become
once again bound up, wound up, tense and taut
At the very moment when our wounds begin to mend
Premature
The limitless infidelity of words
strung into sentences,
into lines, inevitably -
if I but once glance away -
betray my intended meaning
with apostate-words
Insufficient
my linguistic heresies - my apostate words
fall short and never once attain
the truth of our measureless moments in the night
which overflow, and into which I ever long to fall -
Into moments brimming with truth, with beauty.
INTERRUPTION
VII
The Fall
F T
A O
L M
L B
E É
N T E
O '
T L
H E
E
NAMELESS PROFONDEUR
DEPTHS SANS NOM
I... What a mistake I make every time I utter the word I to refer to myself. My self is not the I that speaks. The
I that speaks is not the self that is or has become. The I is always in the rose-hued dawning of consciousness;
I am always ahead of myself, my self is never there at dawn, lingering in the loneliest hours of night.
I... Strictly speaking, I am nothing. Is there any trait, characteristic or piece of personal history that one could
excise from my very BEING? No. Not because none can be removed, but rather that NONE TOUCH ON
MY BEING. They are merely accidental, extra-essential, extra-conceptual; THEY DO NOT CONCERN
ME. What then is the I but the man without qualities? But then, I insist in my absolute uniqueness, my
absolute singularity. Indeed, the variations of the human are infinite, but the variations in the concept of the
human are nil! But were my uniqueness situated in the accidental, it would not merely be unsatisfying, but
rather it would, in principle, open the door to identity - would my characteristics, history, etc be replicated
precisely, so would the I. But I WILL NOT BE REPEATED. I am a different I at each moment, each passing
I becoming a part of my self. Deracinate me; extirpate all qualities from my being; I will still be, but I will
scarcely be at all myself.
My self is the ossification of my characteristics and who I have been. I yearn for eternity in this petrification
of the soul. Little did I realize this when I sighed and said that I was overjoyed to be myself again. To be
myself again. What a laugh! I can hardly suppress the wry smile that creeps across my lips, contorting them as
if in death throes. In this very utterance I became alienated from myself.
Perhaps this is why I can never communicate myself, why no one will ever see ME, why no one can ever
desire ME. I'm at once singular and fungible. I am...
(i)
Eros and Mnemosyne
What am I to make of the eroticism of memory? How am I to see through this afterglow, these aureoles, to
the truth? The truth? There is no way. The past has already changed in becoming memory. In becoming
memory, I inadvertently, and yet inevitably, accorded each and every memory with a value that exceeds its
actuality. At every moment I FEEL. In every moment there is a residue, expressible only in affective terms. In
truth, memory is absolutely inexpressible. It is a futile endeavor to convey either a factum brutum or the totality
of experience. This is why I can lie in bed for hours, my eyes riveted shut, my pupils fixed, as I explore the
unfathomable depths of stillborn worlds. Stillborn worlds, once summoned to appear before my minds eye,
reconstitute themselves as a macabre dance of images. This play of images is hardly innocent or innocuous - it
rends me. Only through this imaginary reconstitution of the past, can I receive the intensity that I crave.
Why cannot I become conscious of the fact that the erotic cast taken on by the past is the result of hindsight?
Why is it not possible for me to recall with equal lucidity the heartrending events? Why must the past always
be looked at with nostalgia?
Stockholm syndrome only scratches the surface. Sometimes I imagine that had I survived the gulag, the
memory even of such years would acquire an erotic afterglow.
God?
I imagine the personal deity to be the ultimate figure of suffering. With each passing step taken in the
direction of omniscience, I realize this. I do not imagine that I ever will approach omniscience. But, with every
thing I know indirectly my knowledge grows. At the same time, however, my power of action remains paltry
in comparison to my possibilities and pitifully limited in its domain. With every knowledge beyond my sphere
of perception my anguish grows. I remember as if it were yesterday, at a concert some years ago I found
myself haunted by the thought that "I know she's fucking someone else, right now." It was not the mere fact
of its occurrence, for I knew full well before and it had not lacerated me so. But rather it was that I was
thinking that thought at the same moment! Had I any inkling of the profundity of this at that time, I should
have instantly lost consciousness.
I imagine a personal deity as omniscient but powerless. Thus, knowing all, its anguish would be amplified to
infinity. It is no wonder then that there can be no such god. Such a god would have long since have died
wounded by anguished desire.
(I)llusion
I imagine a trial in which conviction is assured. I imagine myself as both defendant and prosecutor;
the judge and jury: the idealized images of past lovers, whom I, in the past, had wronged. Absolution:
Impossible - the future foreclosed; so this image proclaims.
In my weaker moments I imagine that the life I lead is that of a fugitive from this most intimate of tribunals.
I've absconded, yet no other choice remained. What traces have I left, aside from a path littered
with the detritus of discarded dreams? My despairing hope is that somewhere beneath the smoldering
rubble lies some fond memory; that is all one can wish of the past.
I wrote these lines in the final months of a time of profound alienation from the world of
action. These lines exhibit the depths of dispossession and a failure of narrative with such
poignancy that today I have difficulty conceiving myself as their author. I found myself betrayed
by identity and by narrative; their attestation was empty while they had become instruments of my
oppression. Through unceasing narrative explanation of my actions I had thereby refigured a part
of myself in the internalization of my persecutory other. Thus I renounced both identity and
narrative, in toto, and yet something remained. Voluntarily deprived of identity and the ability to
narrate, I remained, as did my faulty of imagination. The exigency of this image impelled me to
record it in writing; writing that exhibits no action and no narrative and in which I found myself
fractured into three identities: the self of imagination, persecutor, and fugitive self. I did not lose
myself; rather I witnessed my own fragmentation. I say witnessed because I did not create or
configure this image; for this image came upon me and I found myself refigured by this writing, a
mimetic representation of self-dispersion.
The aura of memory is like love after the fact. It is a lie to myself by myself that I've forgotten was a
lie. It is a metaphorics of memory and desire. I forget the failures, I forget the reality, I remember the
eidos, the idealized image. If it really were this that I remembered the aura would never have cracked.
I retrospectively falsify my memory to re-create the aura. The erotic afterglow grows with time's
passage. I'm becoming trapped in my memories. Why can't I just believe a new lie?
The fragments have at last escaped me. I can no longer conjure up the erotic aura of memory. I can
no longer re-create the aura. Eros was kidnapped by Mnemosyne who then turned fugitive and
escapes me. The memories remain, yet they do not. They are still there yet their are denuded
representations, lacking all form and all feeling. They are dead objects in my memory, monuments -
memorial to times past. But was Eros really kidnapped? No. Eros at last escaped Mnemosyne, and so
deprived memory of its erotic charge. Eros, now in secret solidarity with Thanatos, looks toward the
possible and beyond that to the impossible - to the future that comes.
There's a stirring within
Strange, suppressed emotions and memories well up and wash over me
Artificial rationality buckles and creaks under the weight of its systematicity
Such feelings have no place within reason;
they corrode reason.
Unassimilable, this overflowing erodes the pillars of reason.
....so this is the outside of thought, the outside of the concept...
The submerged is now surfacing.
Reason and fear held emotion beneath the waves
to drown the pre-rational – feeling
The repressed returns and suppresses repression.
Sentiments again arise with such intensity they burn holes into the fabric of being. Black holes....
Indeterminate, yet in a moment every emotional tone manifests.
as raw feeling.
There is a particular poverty of words
revealed by uncensored emotion
poverty pointing directly toward inherently incomparable richness
the plenitude of experience
pure
in an intensive state.
I see the aura and its incipient cracks.
One crack, another swell in luminosity.
Every diminution accompanied by augmentation,
the quanta of aura henceforth resistant to repression.
Objectless, emotion disrobed displays a pure state.
Objectless, desire disenchanted shows its pure state.
... am I subject if object is absent? Desire unfulfillable
Unfulfilled yet intensified.
the only true fulfillment of desire...
Désir à Dieu
There's always a sense that an insight that has yet escaped me lies just beyond the frontiers of
consciousness. This sense is invariably accompanied by a feeling, an idea that this next insight, this insight
whose immanence I sense, will render the world intelligible in its immanence to me and my immanence to it
- it would bridge the gap between consciousness and being and with it bring at once the fulfillment of the
desire to be God and lose oneself in that becoming while at the same time retaining self-consciousness and
identity - this retention dissevered from reflection but rather constitutes a perfectly immanent awareness of
self. But maintenance of identity and self perpetuates a fiction and renders this immanence false. No
mediating term can be permitted, for one inserts a crack into this field of immanence through which
reflection may enter and spread cracks in the aura. Desire for the universe and becoming God through
amorous fusion with the beloved must be unmediated, unlimited and unrestrained. Why? Because the
entrance of reflection through the cracked, broken aura introduces transcendence, time and reflection - this
throws us back into ourselves and revels to us our finitude and mortality. Wanting to be the totality of the
real (the universe, the world, my yet unknown beloved, God) equally implies not wanting to know
everything. Must I renounce my quest to know in order for desire to be fulfilled?
Is a disenchanted world worth fighting for?
Demythologization can only find passion in making itself a myth.
Demythologizations: a performative contradiction par excellence.
Was noch?
Demythologization re-enchants, re-mythologizes the world - the mythology of reason.
Enlightenment: the new religion.
Why advance reason except out of a religious passion for reason? Likewise there is a rational impulse in religion and
mythology, a latent enlightenment.
Thus the pendulum in perpetual motion continues to swing.
If it is true that fictions are essential to life
We must then delude ourselves,
we must lie to ourselves and be ever in bad faith
if we are ever to take leave of the present.
I thus create new tropes and narrative forms for future life;
These I conjure and summon out of the depths of imagination
grounds for new fictions to arise and replace
all those autochthonous metaphors and fictions,
dispelled, disenchanted, and deracinated by the progress of demytholigization
God – knocked out – not knocked off...
Imaginary Elegies For Reality
Logomachia
And such desires drive toward a scarcely perceptible, perhaps imaginary end
An end illuminated by the pellucid light of the faculty of imagination
Words
could have made a world
could have been a world
Being
in modal Plenitude
Essential, eternal solitude
in a becoming of worlds
Words enduring
would bring forth a world
becoming real, would have made a world
(im)possible worlds
-- not one --
rather a limitless multitude of worlds
Unawaited, unexpected
Rupture
Introduces, interjects
A moment of anachrony
Shatters the continuity
Reintroduces the autarky
Of originary temporality
In a change of epoch
Heralding the end of the reign of tyrannical chronology
And reduces words to silence
For their capital offense:
Imposing linearity and homogeneity
Impoverishing experience
And making of time
A commodity
A Revelation of Eternity
As time decelerates
and grids to a halt
I grasp infinity
and I apprehend eternity
in my static imaginary
as pure presence
in an enduring present
Not gift but the given
all time as a charity donation
Never again can your nails, your pinions, your talons, envenom me
my vow ever was exacting beyond compare
yet I remained true and truth revealed to me
beneath the trappings of quotidian docility
lies ceaselessly coursing rivers of time and change
currents carrying me relentlessly toward the sea
making my passage ineluctable and ever bitter, bitter-sweet
you saw no beauty, no consolation in the bitter-sweet, but saw only the bitter
for your fear ever eruped in rage,
becoming
indifference and
definitive disappearance.
to your deepest horror vacui you succumb and fade
disappearance, your sole refuge from true disappearance
Reason, that crumbling edifice of sand, at last, was overcome by waves of time
Perverse, audacious Chance in time exchanged vision for reason,
Limit-figures of desire now dashed to pieces,
and my outstretched hand lay empty and still, still weak-willed grasping,
until the living wax-character script flowed down to my wrist...
...to put an end to all grasping and striving – in recognition of dice already cast...
8-5-8
Who were we to cut time in two?
To place a hand outstretched between two infinities
Digits fingering the supernumerary infinite of time
enumerating, denumerating,
digitally devolving,
continuum contracting
into
wind-blown desert-sand-seconds
counted and counted, once and eternally again
by three anthropomorphic clock-hands
grandfather-clock-hands
the clock
deified, itself now digital
clutching, counting,
sand-seconds
passing
sur-viving the dis-aster of man
two infinities of time once again become one
one-not-one
number-no-longer
analog continuum
Synchronic Chronology
In lunar or solar cycles, so natural
On inscriptions, of acid-etched dates
artificial and calendrical
Transitory moments
Movements mortal-immortal
Indeterminate intervals
Instants – interstitial
Pointillistic self-conception
Time, strung-out, in unceasing reduction,
Thought-thinned, wasted (away),
without width, wan, in one-dimension
infinite-infinitesimal
filaments fill
my unbent
life-needle eye
fitfully,
and yet in intervals
even-stitched onward
Muse (I)
You will be my inspiration
You will be my desperation
My hope
Despair
Time crushes me in the absence of my muse...
The ground upon which hope and desperation wage war is ravaged
My heart is torn, my wounds cut deep
Light of day, oppressive sun, you I denounce
With all the fury of exploding stars
Speak to me,
No, do not speak,
Not with words of language
Speak to me,
Yes, without words of language, Speak
rather with a silent tongue
You
I saw your face
Barely beyond the blurred future-present boundary
I saw your face – did you see mine? through the mists of this borderland, in the ether
I saw the words-non-words
Written upon your chest in a scarlet script, incandescently
I saw those words-non-words, in which we recognize and speak with one another
I felt your embrace
After our utterance, our words-non-words, in mutual intelligibility
I felt warm in your embrace, in which we lose ourselves within one another
Into The Future
Endeless
Confluence-Crossroads
My word in malediction
against the tyrranical reign of duration
against time-spacing
against delay and deferral
My desire in extremis
a first raised irate at the hours
intervening - defining
the interval of separation
My desire à la fin
to abolish, to obliterate,
and finally to efface
all that separates us,
divides us, the one
from the other,
in two
Poetry?
How completely changed my world is; had I not kept pace, evolving in tandem, I would be hard-pressed to
recognize the life and world I now inhabit as my own. To be certain, I remain at base the same person with
the same history, quirks and fascinations, and yet there has been a distinct shift on some other fundamental
level. I cannot help but notice just how vaguely and nebulously I am describing this - yet this is the nature
of the beast. While I can't quite put my finger upon it, and neither can I precisely indicate it, I have hardly
been alone in taking note of a rather dramatic set of changes, whether endogenous or exogenous in origin
and operation. To say that I have become happier and that I see my world, with its richness of meaning
and experiences, with rosier eyes is certainly true, however reductive such a description would be.
No, this is not reducible to a mere shift in outlook - scarcely anything remains the same save my ability to
recognize myself as he whom I was at an earlier time. More appropriately, I could say that the past no
longer fixes my attention - melancholia and neurosis have given way to an open future and access to this
very moment in which we always live - and I see the vast expanse of possible futures which lie open to me.
Yes, that is how I would prefer to speak of this tectonic shift in my self, life and world - I can see already
on the horizon the immensity of change and the expanse of hitherto unknown possibilities now open to
me and, in a sense, inevitablly to come. I refuse to look any longer over my shoulder and permit the past to
reign tyrranical; rather I gaze toward the future with eyes wide and arms open!
A Protracted Convalescence
A year ago I was struck by a certain strange aphasia – an aphasia in admixture with a peculiar amnesia.
During my long convalescence, I found myself unable to speak or write of myself, and it was only with
great difficulty and under duress that I could call up an image of myself into the view of my mind's eye. At
times as though in a dissociative trance, my actions were not entirely my own. At the same time, when
called upon to articulate the reasons guiding my deeds, I found myself mute; there were no reasons, I was
as though an aphasic automaton, speechless and without a will.
Thus I spent much of the last year, a year during which my wounds from the one prior at last closed and
began to heal. At times lucidity returned, as did my clarity of speech and remembrance, but more often the
demands of daily life stopped words in my throat. Even among the closest of friends words failed to make
me either comprehensible or capable of true communication. Events, ordinary or extraordinary prolonged
this period of silent distress and solitude; desired events, yes, but yet disruptive to the healing of wounds
torn so deep.
At last my year of convalescence drew to a close – my faculties of speech, memory and imagination have
returned stronger than they had previously been. Likewise, I have emerged stronger than I had previously
been; hardly without scars, yes, but free of the dead weight of the past.
“To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld. Precisely between what is most
similar, illusion lies most beautifully; for the smallest cleft is the hardest to bridge... There is no outside. But all sounds make
us forget this; how lovely it is that we forget... Speaking is a beautiful folly: with that man dances over all things. How lovely
is all talking, and all the deception of sounds! With sounds our love dances on many-hued rainbows.”
- F. Nietzsche, Zarathustra III: The Convalescent
Convalescence: A Poem
This moment -
Shared moments to come -
Like so many dreams of desire -
Profoundly real
And yet I remain in profound terror
of a sudden waking and dissolution
Attain
The experience seems quite familiar, although I am quite loathe to say that I've experienced the same, for
that would be too presumptuous. Disconnection, dispossession, alienation: they are all too familiar, they
become all too comforting. The joy of dispossession: a freedom that comes only when a future is not to
be shared.
I think that there may simply be some of us who need this freedom, above all. I am not sure, though, that
the word and trope transitory properly expresses this - to be sure there is a wandering, a transit, a drift into
and out of the lives of others, but there's another side to it, at least in the ephemerality of my own
experience.
Rather than transitory I would say, metaphorically: poetic, lyrical, musical. Life as poem, life as music: the
transitoriness of an orchestral movement, or the flow of a poem. Episodes in life overlap and return as
themes: we are the experience produced harmonically and in resonance with the past at any given point in
time - dispossession then is the disconnect between what we are as a harmonic product and the themes
that constitute use.
But themes return, and so do people. The freedom of dispossession is the allure to which others are
drawn and at the same time that which allows us to revisit the past, free of its bonds.