Books

The Cross



   There was a mother whose son had been taken from her, a son who had become involved in the world in ways that led him deeper into it and further from her. This mother loved her son and refused to allow the world to hide him from her any longer. And so she began to search for him. She searched for him even though she knew where he must be. She searched for him because she did not want to know where he was, because she wanted to be wrong. But she was not wrong. And when she found him it was as she had always known him— he was suffering. For others he was being crucified, for others he was a saviour, a redeemer. To her he was a son. 
   She found him still alive, nailed to a cross. She was allowed to approach him, to witness and accompany him in his final torment. He greeted her as he was able; and then, with his remaining strength he began to explain to her why they were crucifying him, why he had to be crucified. Perhaps he thought that if she understood his situation she would suffer less. Yet, at this moment it was clear that he did not know his mother at all. She did not require instruction in the ways of suffering. Yet, she waited patiently for his explanation, and listened to every word in silence. She let him speak because she understood that his futile attempts to explain his predicament were the seeds of his punishment. 
   Looking at his mother, detailing his own suffering, he could only look beyond her. He did not see her and he did not see her suffering, nor could he understand that it was, and always had been, expansive enough for him as well. To know in this way is to dismiss, or simply to miss, what bears you.
   Looking into the eyes of her son, those agonized hollows, it was impossible for her not to acknowledge the futility of the ordeal his cross obliged.    

   There are some things which one knows and cannot communicate. Such things one must share in silence. Compassion is the name of this silence. 

   If it were possible to say precisely what must be said people would not talk so much… perhaps even not at all.

   It has been said that mouths were never intended to deliver truths. And so we are, with our thinking and with our words, without question excessive, perhaps even criminal... at the very least we are perverted. And so think nothing, say nothing. The world smiles upon the faithful and will grant you indulgences. 

   … a word, like everything else, must cower before it can crawl.

   Only someone who understands the insufficiency of language, and speaks from that insufficiency, is able to communicate anything of value.

   Moreover, it is because we are able to speak about what we don’t know that we speak. Because we are able to describe the infamies of things that have never happened, we speak. Because we can elaborate the disappointments endured as a consequence of our desire for impossibilities, we speak. Because we can propose a world that will never be and then prepare for its realization, we speak. And because we can say precisely what is not, and more importantly, what should not be, we will never cease speaking.

   We speak in defiance of our retreating words and we call this sincerity.

peindicy: n; The cycle that is traced in peindicy is as follows: at the end, the earth begs to be judged. This judgment is an echo of Shestov’s comment that by suffering one earns the right to judge. The earth, in begging for judgment, needs a judge. In other words, it needs one who has suffered. This concluding desire mirrors the Buddhist teaching that begins the book, all life is suffering. This utterance runs, or journeys, throughout the cycle. the human being which is the bearer of this utterance, the one who is asked to be a judge, demonstrates what happens whenever one reaches the end, the limit of anything— as an individual one may accept the earth’s request for more suffering by refusing to further the cycle (and refusing to engender, or justify others) which is achieved by breaking the cycle in a final act of judgment.

evidence: n; 1. Evidence is more of a legislation than a game. The legal reference to the word evidence points to this. What the legislation says is this: in order for something to exist or for a phenomenon to have occurred (e.g. a life) there must be evidence to support it. If this is the legislation (or boundary condition) then what types of phenomenon (lives) does it allow to exist? Where are the boundaries of what is and what is not (a life)? 
2. Evidence will not be understood. 
3. What makes itself apparent through Evidence is a concern with gender— more specifically, with (the possibility of finding) a definition of gender-as-lived and not gender-as-concept or gender-as-biological-ideal. The strategy employed is that of a female (diarist) written by a man. If this strategy is understood literally, then a problem arises. Since this is being written by a white male it is true that it is written from a position of privilege. the concern with the neutralization of gender is therefore a privileged concern (for someone not privileged, for someone marginalized such a neutralization is an eradication of their identity, an identity which those in power would gladly see eradicated, forever unrecognized). If however, the strategy employed in Evidence is understood metaphorically (which it should be, as should all my work) then the problem above vanishes. What we are left with, the man writing/thinking as woman, the gender neutralization, becomes hyperbolic. That is, what is presented is an extreme case of anti-masculinity, of male possibility in a world infested with its privilege. 
4. Evidence is the privilege of presence; from it the absent, the unrepresentable are always excluded.
6. Evidence itself is evidence of the constraint / device used to perceive/gather it. 
7. If history is nothing more than the parade of metaphors, then the fact that poets (who are the master of metaphor construction and metaphor literacy) are so ridiculously undervalued is evidence of the blindness of society and the power of the dominant ideologies to blind. 
9. Evidence is the repeated collision of irreconcilabilities. 
10. Evidence is insinuated by Marcus Aurelius when he says briefly, all the things of the body, a river; all the things of the spirit, dream and delirium. 
11. Great art makes evident that there is something which escapes mediation but which makes use of (a form of) mediation... the way a diver makes use of a cliff. and so, for art that is not great, for art that is not really art but only entertainment, there is never anything except mediation... there is no diver, no leap. 
12. When I look at, when I step into the world and witness the overwhelming evidence of generations of bondage which has been so all encompassing that it no longer needs to be subtle, the world seems somewhat depressing. But then... there are moments in anyone's life when the chains miraculously fall away. The truly depressing reality exposes itself when a person in such an instance of freedom does whatever is necessary to re-enslave themselves, to gird and bind themselves and protect themselves against any future miracles of this kind. 
13. I read philosophers not to apprehend the consequences of their work— their systems, abstractions, arguments— but for the traces of a living mind that are evident in their efforts and in all they may have been unable to build… their ruins… their persistence. 
14. “Evidence is the principal ingredient of beauty”. - Franceso Milizia, L’Arte di Vedere. 
16. My respect for fact, for evidence— that is, my passion for scientific experimentation and hypothesis testing— is grounded in my being a poet— that is, my sensibility of the groundless nature of our lives and moreover, my continual engagement with this world that is always, breathtakingly and horrifically, otherwise.

cipher: n; 1. Cipher and Poverty is concerned with limitation and indirect communication — communication in which its inherent limitations are the basis of what it wants to communicate. and why would anyone want to communicate this aspect of reality? the answer is that this inexpressible, meta-linguistic realm is the place where everything of importance happens, rests, hides, is born... 
2. Jaspers says that the-world-as-appearance, as a cipher speaks the language of transcendence, a language of many meanings, as penetrating as it is non-cognizable. This is exactly the notion of cipher I wrestled with, and eventually married in Cipher and Poverty. the stakes of this concern, of this engagement are very high (as can be sensed in Jaspers' comment). basically, what is at stake is an authentic, existentially open, communicable life.

formalism: n; An act of desperation. (Cipher and Poverty is an example of this).

negation: n 3. A criticism of Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing) is that its extreme negations are depressing. The techniques of negation I employ are nothing more than equivalents to the Hindu understanding of the Self; in other words, I also express the not this, not that of Brahman. I don't think it is the instances of negation or even the understanding it implies which people find troubling. Instead, I believe it is the reminder that such an understanding is possible but is not forcefully present in our contemporary society… and this disturbs them.

the day breathes


the day hurls stones
and then runs away

the night is too poor
to repair us

the day knocks
it wants to tear us down

the night webs
our collapsing bodies

in the end

the day breathes against you
and traces its name

the night lifts me open
and leaps.

A man about to drown

   He is walking slowly along the crowded sidewalk. In the distance one can see the old stone bridge. He is walking towards the bridge. Compared to those around him he walks as though weighed down by some great burden. His clothes hang from him as though they are soaking wet. But his clothes are not wet. As he walks he appears to be struggling for breath. His whole body seems to be flailing wildly but no one notices, no one stops to save him. People just let this man carry on with his journey, with his desperation. They don't stand in his way, they will not deter him from reaching the bridge. To them there is nothing alarming or out of the ordinary when a man such as this walks through the city towards the old stone bridge. And there is nothing to stop when such a man leaps from the bridge into the cold river below because such a man as this has been a drowned man for as long as people can remember him.

the shovel

each morning
we do not hear the shovel
as it drags along the sidewalk   
yet we wake

and death is always close to us

the shovel dragging along the sidewalk
we hear it every night
but still we are able to sleep.

abyss: n; 2. To be creative it is crucial to go to the abyss, to find what is abysmal in one's understanding. That one must go to the abyss does not mean one has to remain there. 

accident: n; 2. Those who follow religion take the accident of their birth seriously.

accord: n; My failures and inconsistencies are no argument against what is true.

achievement: n; 2. It is enough to pass one’s life continually preventing things from occurring, things which one does not desire, things which one fears. Such a life of negative enthusiasm reaches it maximum zeal and efficacy when even the possibility of achieving something is prevented from manifesting itself.

affinity: n; 2. To love the incoherent is to understand them. 3. Idiocy and intelligence are not opposed— in fact they are lovers. 

age: n; 4. If you have not been humiliated, disfigured, utterly broken by time, then you have arrived too late. 6. I have always been older than my age, and younger than my contemporaries. 9. The lines that appear on our faces, our hands, our entire bodies, are traces of all that we have not expressed, written, spoken, sung, and all that we will never express— the importance of which is evidenced by the fact that our entire body transforms itself, irreversibly and fatally, in order to express just this very incapacity.

agony: n; 2. That living exploits agony is not in question. What is arguable is whether this natural resource of existence is limited or renewable.