September 08, 2014

The road and the treeAndré Derain d. September 8, 1954

Abstract By Hsia Yü Translated by Steve Bradbury Leaping past “the calamity of love and the aloneness of not loving” and all manner of other for instances I meander back to the corner grocery and see five syllables on a wall—“Fresh Cuttlefish Roe”—then off I go again to the arts and craft supply store to buy 50 oil pastels 50 individually wrapped colors that each emit a tiny sigh as it passes through the register I listen to the sound of each color passing the sorrow love gives rise to is quite enough to sway me. The sorrow alone can make a person feel quite extraordinary can make a person far more capable of coping with those problems that come up smitten with the whole kit full of delicious maliciousness unexpectedly expressive (how the words carry us forward) our story is cut short caught up in someone else’s for if we are to presuppose that every single person is the best possible casting choice to play the lead in his or her own story ...

The Bagpiper at CamiersAndré Derain c.1911

bartleby politics: on disavowal, derangement, and drugs Jake Nabasny3:am

As I lay in this bed, slightly dizzy with a minor hangover, I am reminded of Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room. He was always a sick child, but later in life his illness restricted him to his bed for all but a single hour of the night. He could only leave his room at that unique hour of the night when the late-night drunks were sleeping and the early-morning workers had not yet woken up. The air was moist and easy to breathe even though his illness was intensifying. Despite being so reclusive, Proust loved to throw parties in absentia. With his hour of freedom, he would visit the halls in which parties were thrown. Constantly feverish, he walked around in a gaudy coat with a fur-lined hood; Proust was an Eskimo in a desert. What better hero could there be to begin this meditation than one who experienced all kinds of displacements, dispersions, delays, derangements, and departures? When many read Proust they see a plethora of anchors, like graveyards of old nautical vessels that have not moved in the past fifty years and probably will not move for another fifty. A history is built and links to the past are constantly made. One imagines the entirety of the Search to be consisting of traces and recollections. This could not be more wrong. Proust’s brilliance lies precisely in his explication of the opposite of this interpretation. What connects Proust to his grandmother’s boots is not remembrance or nostalgia, but delirium. The very proliferation of signs and the impossibility of an absolute reading (viz. an absolute origin) is what the Search truly discovers. In other words, it is not the destination that the reader discovers at the end of the Search, but searching itself. Proust introduces a new polarity, one that is usually ignored, but more often miscomprehended. Anchors and memory define one pole, while the other is designated by wild oceans and delirium. According to this framework, one can begin to understand state violence, the prohibition of drugs, Western epistemology, human rights, behavioral health clinics, and several other politically-charged topics. Proust provides a new revolutionary strategy by re-conceptualizing power structures. Following this line of thought may be enlightening for some, but for those to whom it speaks directly, it will be intoxicating. At this point we must depart from the Proust anecdote (which is also an antidote) and turn to a web of texts that contribute to a general theory of disavowal.

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Drunken Boat Issue 19

Lucas Klein translating Li Shangyin

Untitled Time to meet is hard to find and parting, too, is hard The east wind has no force and a hundred flowers fail Unless spring silkworms reach their death silk cannot be spun When waxy candles turn to ash will tears begin to dry In morning’s mirror only worried about her temples turning white She recites at night while I’m sure she feels the chill glow of the moon From this place to Mount Penglai is just a little road Bluegreen bird indulge me please and spy a little glance

Effect of Sun on the WaterAndré Derain1906

Lightning Storm Mind: Pre-Ancientist Meditations Max Cafard exquisite corpse Heed the Word of Our Ancestor! The Way is obscure, but it is the Way. The Logos is the Way. This Way is obviously obscure and obscurely obvious. The Naturing of Nature is Lightning Storm Mind. Awakening Mind has a Lightning Storm Nature. Thus stroke Heraclitus. Our Obscure Ancestor taught that “you can’t step into the same river twice.” Translation, at the risk of falling into the icy waters of unsalutary clarity: “Step into the river!” “For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to forget how to step into the river. For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to step only into their ideas.” Will these poor creatures survive all this unlearning? Will the river survive all this forgetting? The world is in fragments. The world was born whole, but everywhere it is in fragments. The world was born whole and not whole, but everywhere it is in fragments.

In short, awakened being, being awakened, is surregional exploration! We become Hidden Nature uncovering Hidden Nature, both having been buried under layers of brute Reality. Yet, brute reality prevails. As Our Ancestor predicted, in Late Civilizationism, we murder to dissect. Murderous clarity reigns over the obscurity of life, the vagueness of the Way. Dissectarianism emerged with the religious fundamentalism and obsessive literalistic reductionism of sixteenth-century protomodernity. Dissectarianism triumphed with the archic and agoric fundamentalism of political and economistic pararationality, raison d’état and raison d’achat. Dissectarianism perfected itself ideologically in dissectarian analytical technological pararationality, and its Evil Twin, dissectarian analytical philosophical pararationality. We are left with the spiritual desolation of dystopian dissectarian paranormality on Evil-Twin Anti-Earth. Still, the hidden remains hidden, and continues, with imperious subtlety, to unhide itself. Our Ancestor warned that “unless you expect the unexpected you will never find it.” Or worse, that we will find it without finding it. We all have a Ghost Problem.