Hut Journal September...................................................................................................

 

 

 
 

 "Perhaps thinking itself must inevitably turn to subterfuge when confronted with the aporia of time...
[....] The first step toward reversing philosophy's foreclosure of the other is to think the otherness of time."
Ned Lukacher / Time-Fetishes: The
Secret History of Eternal Recurrence

"Unless I happen to become the vehicle of an unknown force, which I then clumsily help to take shape, I cannot read, or write, or even think. This vacuum is terrifying. I fill it up as best I can, as one sings in the dark. Besides my medium-like stupidity effects an air of intelligence which makes my blunders pass for subtle cunning, and my sleepwalker's stumbling for the agility of an acrobat."

Jean Cocteau



August 28,1999

It's probably useless to continue any sort of semiotics of media--there are plenty of such readings and they seem mostly to constitute an academicism which rapidly revolves into parodies of themselves. In fact there is something disheartening about it all; what is accomplished by it? (although much the same can be said of almost everything)....

That being said, I happened to be watching Saturday morning television and on the Disney channel of all things. There was an computer animated intro or filler between shows with a sound track. We move into a large, complicated city and the song recites the days of the week, our view point moving into various businesses, the work days of a busy city, going over the roof tops, etc., very flashy and well done. For Thursday and Friday they go into a science fiction gothic factory space, the factory begins to transform like a Japanese manbot or carbot, turning increasingly fanciful...we see a HUT in a little grass field for the Saturday insignia...then back to the factory and we see they have combined both scenes, the hut is on a spire on top of the factory that is being pushed higher and higher by the mutational fantasia down below, as playful vehicles begin to move on Saturn-like rings around the whole mushrooming skyrocketing assembly, all of the energies of the work week geared for one purpose, for this hut release on Saturday.

It had the feeling in a way of a cabinet of curios, something held aloft to keep sacrosanct--and by the same token inaccessible, incredible efforts directed to a very simple ideal, one basically unchanged by all the machination all around it and even made quixotic the more one thinks about it. The hut is like some sort of simple locket held by an ornate chain around one's neck, holding something precious...unfortunately, it has been rusted shut and all one can do is devise stronger and fancier chains to hold it as it is passed along from one hand to another.

Unfortunately at a certain point no one is certain what it contains or if it contains anything.

8.22

Let's face it: a (public) life has `importance' for us only if it has climbed to the top of the demographic pyramid (by whatever means) or is somehow rutting around beneath the base of it. Standing the pyramid on it's head -- as the net tends to do with its pornographic/conspiratorial rhizome -- doesn't change the hierarchical configuration all that much. yet.
...might make for a precarious balancing act..HELLO!??

8.23

I couldn't sleep around two in the last morning last night so I go up and clicked around the cable. Sometimes I play a Breton-esque game where I try to catch wards or sentence parts from different channels.

But last night I came across this guy Bob Larson (heh, easy to get him confused with the cartoonist--or one of Gary's characters anyway) who is a TV preacher with a twist. His big interest apparently is the occult and the demonic. I remember coming across one of his shows (that time he was affecting some kind of radio announcer drag, with headphones draped over his shoulders, sitting in front of a mike in a control room) trying to convince us that UFOs were spawn of the devil, Satan's minions come as scouting parties in advance of the millennium, come to grab some souls ahead of time.

Well, his new thing is public exorcisms evidently. He showed a church in Alaska that he `performed' in and a few minutes into his spiel, a commotion breaks out in the audience, and some kid with braces on his teeth who is `possessed by the devil' comes forward, all hunched up, sort of huffing his words in a growl as Larson escorts him to the front. The boy's father is hastily summoned who, while seeming slightly bemused, participates in the exorcism. In the course of the thirty minute show, we go through the whole narrative of postulation, discovery, confrontation, overcoming, and deliverance and salvation. I couldn't tell whether the whole thing was staged or whether the boy was somehow `ventriloquized' by Larson; certainly there was staging involved, of however disingenuous or unconscious fashion.

It will be interesting to see the fate of this Larson approach for the TV preachers. Gone are the days when folks simply recited their devotion to Christ and hopes of redemption. Now, in the times of `routine' serial killers, high school killings and so on, what is required is for the devil to manifest himself in the midst of the believers own sanctuary! and to be overcome of course... Perhaps one day the parishioners won't be so lucky; I wonder what kind of times THAT will be reflective of...
-----
From some notes I found (among other disturbing things, like a book made, given to me, by a certain person, with photos. I opened it then slammed it shut. I thought I had burned everything...I have to resign myself that there is no release from this...no release not seeing her, no release seeing her);:

some startled grace
a calling
on the sly
everything revolves
on
ice hinges
turning melting
freezing

stuck, slanted grief
warmed
to passing touch
then
slid
from
grace to grave
gravity's halo.
-------------
The first hint of autumn today, rain for the first time in a month, cool, overcast. I have things I should be doing, things I should be thinking....but the office cleanup and...discoveries I made, have made me both listless and restless. I can't even manage to pull a moral out of anything. I wrote this in an email last night to someone:
we live in a deadly metallic universe, contradictory, mean and cruel yet exhilirating at the same time, a Nietzschean world in fact, frenzied dancing on the precipice as the fiddler plays harder and faster, driving us all into delirium:
"We are for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the universal will.
...in spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as
individuals, but as the ONE living being, with whose creative joy we are united."
F. Nietzsche

I had planned to write more tonight but I was up till 3 last night and up early this morning..feeling very un-productive and tired...I think all this writing about L. is starting to have an affect (sic) on me...it
used to be that I got up thinking about her and went to bed obsessing about her, getting up in cold sweats thinking thinking thinking ... RIDICULOUS!! really, give me a fuckin' break cheatham.

sorry. flashbacks...lots of people got it lots worse than me, I got it easy really (like all yr losses for example)...stuff, people break off in you and it/they festers and forms cavities and you can't get the shit out (whether its mothers or L. or P. or daddies or nieces or That One Special Time or That One or That Beach or That Smell, That Nipple, That Rose, That Road, That Fuck, That Front Door...gag gag gag

sorry...I'll try to be a little more civil next time, just feeling
very tired tonight...'loose and hard to swallow' as Bowie sez..
rob

we're possessed by other people in one way or another. I came across this quote rummaging around this morning which I'm using for my .sig now:
"In truth, we are potentially or actually hallucinating people
during the greater part of our lives."
from a book on the Freud/Fliess correspondence.

poor reader. are you getting as fatigued as me?
--------
Eleven p.m.
after a more or less worthless day, I decided to do some design work. Took a break to walk around the block. I feel like the neither-hot-nor-cold weather: I'm neither happy nor sad, neither this nor that, a sort of mote floating along the small brick middle class ranch houses. No lights on to speak of, even at eleven o'clock. Almost a full moon, will be tomorrow I guess. I feel tonight like that figure head on a prow of a ship, the earth ship you remember from my childhood fantasy, moving scud like through the scuds and remnants of the twentieth century. Even though I'm not this, I'm not that...I'm still at the breaking wave of life. And I always will be as long as I'm alive. No one is farther along than me and never will be; we are each on the prow of our own ship facing always into the wind (well, it does die down occasionally). No matter what, at this time and under this moon---this is the breaking wave (and the only one) of time (what was it that program on the discovery of longitude said? "As long as you know the time, you're not lost." One would like to think that as long as you are alive, in some respects you have a rough estimate of, if not THE, at least time in its most fundamental sense. But of course that would mean we are never lost, a thought which requires a rather large leap of faith. But I can see a certain truth in that. It's the place that religion is born. But also panic attacks. And Cartesian grids. And malevolent gods...

But then isn't that sometimes the problem? We ARE time, no matter how you slice it. When I die time stops and I'm not only lost I'm NOT...

But as long as I AM ... why, yes, I'm at the crest of the wave...even if it does feel awfully tattered and unstable ...

When I was a kid I had a terrible cold which turned into a mild form of pneumonia. I would have terrible gushes of phlegm which I could hardly swallow. One day I COULDN'T swallow and had a terrible panic attack, gasping for breath, running around the house, banging into doors, wildly trying to breathe. When my mother finally took me to the doctor, he told her not to worry, that if I did pass out, I would relax, my throat would lose it's constriction and I would start breathing again.

I guess that's why we have booze. Passing out thought is a hard way to get a modicum of relaxation and surcease from pain.

8.27

I've been doing a little graphic work lately with some clip art books. When I find an image or part of an image I want to use I put a piece of card stock behind the page and then use an Exacto knife to cut out the image.

I cam back the next day to the couch where I was working and found an enigmatic piece I didn't remember cutting out. It was a small piece, about the size of a nickel, a line drawing of the heads of two women, joined sort of at the hair area, one flowing in a slightly different direction from the other. The cutting seemed pretty precise around the whole small piece, following the indentations and curves of the heads and hair of the two women, looking somewhat like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle except with an intact image.

Except that I didn't cut it out. On the back of the piece, was just a random section of another piece of line art, indecipherable even. When I first sat down the next day and saw it, I thought that perhaps I had inadvertently cut through to a second page, maybe forgetting my backing card stock. That, however, seems improbable given the preciseness with which the image is traced/cut.

So, there is sort of an enigma: was the piece cut by happenstance, by accident, and such that I forgot or was unconscious of the deed? Or by some other, un-named because unknowable, process, a process of miraculation that operates, or hides, solely in the realm of the banal commonplaces of everyday life, some miracle-making machinery that lurks in the interstices of the ordinary, revealing to us things we already know, manifesting objects that masquerade as the detritus of the first order reality which we daily navigate. Strangely enough they would be apports which would immerse us MORE fully into the time stream, rather than having the effect of lifting us out, almost like tab stops on a word program, tacking us into place more solidly, even our miracles rounding themselves almost immediately back into the home space, spending almost no conceptual time between the stars or in the `ether'.

Well, that's a disturbing thought. Even our latter-day `miracles' would act to hem us into the fabric of `nowness'. Only a slight misplacement, or ever-so-slight change of features, which would then pose itself as a temporal gap, or memory loss, piece of forgetfulness, to a pragmatic age: the only way that `the miraculous' can survive, by inching itself through the clutter, the flotsam and jetsam, of our constructed world (itself of a fairly miraculous nature if you think about it hard enough), some cartoon character running from pillar to post, occasionally taking the shape of a mis-sewn teletubbie, laying forgotten on the carpet of the factory floor.

There, in the occasional odd mispronunciation of matter, would be the only place that a certain `depth' of time (what used to be called `eternity') could hide, biding it's time ... or, on the other hand, perhaps in the final stages of decay, if we can even think in TERMS of eternity decaying into the rag tag assortments in the cut-out bins of western technical culture.

Then it would have been quite a trip from the great world-forming prophesies and miracles (of which we are the final fruiting) of the early Egyptians, Jews, Christians, and Greeks, to the `bellowing miracle' of Schreber, to a forgotten slip of paper, a misplaced accent so to speak.

Perhaps (if I could indulge in a bit of extreme speculation---and if I can't do it in my own millennial journal then where??!) perhaps such a slight fluttering at the edges of the world (like walking though an autumn forest floor, slight movement of leaves all around, myriad hidden life forms underneath) is indicative of that pregnant moment in the Great Turning of the hourglass of the world that doctrines of the Eternal Return speak of, a moment of pause and stillness (this could be an extended moment of course, extended even over many years). The fluttering gradually changes to shaking, as the grains of temporal sand begin to run back through, then to great guffaws of laughter, sheets of cosmic jest rain down, slipping back into some predawn world, where only a slight rustle of matter is heard/felt (maybe only the joining and stripping of DNA at some point), grinding against its neighbor before the necessary temporal heat is generated to thaw the Great Cycle again. Over and over and over.

Such thinking at least has the therapeutic value of seeing the immediacy of contemporary human values as so much dross. Therapeutic in that it takes some of the burden off of one (OK then, me) to have the `right' ego. But of course maybe that's simply another ploy of the Great Turning, especially when it's demographically magnified...

(As a side note, I am reading Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence --hence the opening quotes for September -- and just found something apropos to the above : "There have always been two `countertimes': the resistant, aporetic character of true (or absolute) time, and philosophy's attempt to pass off its prosthetic replacement for the thing-in-itself." This occulted other stream I suppose is what I often refer to as `Egyptian' -- a misuse no doubt just as severe as those who would wish to demonize that particular tributary. But it seems that we have few choices in the matter at this late date. Certain philosophers attempt to hold those gates open or at least bring attention to those `hinge' mechanisms (thinking of Derrida specifically here)...but that is misunderstood just as often also..)
-------

Many, many people feel deprived now (I'm speaking of the extended `now' of modernism), and often it is phrased as a deprivation of justice (there are some many objects around now being manufactured, new ones and those left over from the previous cycle of manufacture that one doesn't hear as much about that kind of deprivation anymore--just as often a kind of suspicion of those objects, and the `miracles' and incongruities they induce in their surroundings.

And in a way, that deprivation is a disappearance of one of those `time-fetishes' that Lukacher spoke of, or the feeling that `time is out of joint' as Hamlet speaks of it. Without going too far into the Heideggerean analysis it derives from, I'd like to take the chance that this won't make any sense but at least give this extended quote from Lukacher who in turn quotes Derrida, on the collision of the concepts of justice and time; I guess decon's answer to that in-justice (deprivation)/time equation is to attempt to hold both of them open:
"The task of thinking the irreducibility of anachrony, of the necessity that it be named, and the impossibility (at least for now) of knowing the referent of that name become for Derrida synonymous with thinking the meaning of justice: `Does not justice as relation the other suppose...the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, - some `out of joint' dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alonte be able to do justice or to render justice to the other as other' (Spectres of Marx). The first step toward reversing philosphy's foreclosure of the other is to think the otherness of time."

Which seems impossible...or when it does come close, drives one to vertiginous paroxysms as in Nietzsche's fallings into meditations on the Eternal Return.

8.30

We love our preconceptions. We can't live without them really. It would be hard to live in the turmoil of freshly turned soil everyday., of having to set up mental house every time we had to deal with a problem.

And yet that is what seems increasingly being asked of us by a culture which is speeding up. After all, the whole fetish of the cyborg is of a creature that is capable of plugging into any situation, assessing it, then finding the right `plug-in' which will deal with it. Any kind of filter `pre-set' (such as a `self' or a `personality') slows down the relay time between problem and solution. (that's why it will be interesting to see what happens to `advertising'. Advertisements come increasingly to seem interface-like much like the human personality they are designed to lock into. Adverts have traditional narrative structures, even if they are only very compact and concise codings or perhaps part of a narrative which is then filled in by the consumer, like codons in a DNA string.

The question is whether it is a NECESSARY interface. One can make a respectable argument that a `personality' (of some sort) is a necessary surface for consciousness to negotiate the boundary between inside/outside more effectively and to produce higher-order units, i.e., society, culture and civilization. (critics of the necessity of personality -- individuation really -- might claim that the social insects do not find the need for such an apparatus; however there is a vicious hermeneutic circle here since it would be very difficult to prove that social insects -- bees, ants, etc. -- don't have some version of individuation to which we are not privy, or perhaps even that different hives have different `personalities'...)

And one could make the argument that advertising is a necessary interface between the economic apparatus and the individual or identity group, acting as simultaneously a notification service and feedback loop. The question is, how necessary is the seduction aspect of its semiotic? The net acts to bring many of these questions into bold relief, shortly before it acts to change them/confound them/detour them...The most salient image for the way the net operates is the old game of choosing by grabbing a baseball bat, then the other side grabs it above the first hand, then the other person grabs it, alternating till the top of the bat is reached and the person who is able to grab and hold it then gets to make the call..it's just that in the case of the net, its a very long handle...

------
Here's the social for many people today. (As Derrida says, it makes the US of A the, ahem, natural ground for deconstruction...America IS deconstruction. but the people who would proffer the following inchoately held views would be the first to condemn many aspects of any formal `theory' of such ---such suspicion being another aspect of post-struc.).)..these comments are the result of several encounters recently:
let's get rid of truth...cause otherwise there are lies
let's get rid of beauty...cause then the ugly appears.
let's get rid of money..then everyone will have some.
let's get rid of the best...cause the worse always accompanies it.
let's get rid of god...since the devil rides on those coattails.
let's take away everything from everybody, then I'll have something...

but, really, at bottom: let's get rid of a `you' and that will give `me' more room to move....

This of course is the expanded self discourse except given over to the discourse of social agency, and hence disguising its nihilistic aspect....instead of using objects/money to expand our self, we simply use other people. sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. (and by working, I mean that both parties get to nihilistically expand their selves, both the server and the served.)

9.8
Working in the `material world' today, trying to prepare a piece to donate to an art auction for my favorite gallery...nevertheless very tiresome, frustrating, and extremely annoying to deal with recalcitrant THINGS. I get very impatient and my attempts to `center' don't work very well when I'm attempting to wrestle a 100 pound piece into place.

An any rate. I went to Mississippi this labor day weekend to visit the folks; herewith the tale, before, during and after:

i-20 shotguns out of Atlanta directly west into Birmingham, then squiggles a bit before both barrels shoot west again, past Cuba, past Moscow and then skirting
Meridian Mississippi. My destination for labor day, just to get out of town for a few days, is my families `ancestral shack' in Philadelphia MS. At Meridian the exit for state highway 19 in the bedraggled tail end of town (never mind that most of the town looks bedraggled), shunts me off the main path a bit then shoots me west again for thirty miles, the road transducing from the continental 90 mph express to the local four lane then stopping down to the standard southern 2 lane blacktop, past piney woods, logging trucks and small isolated houses -- hell, just six miles outside of Meridian there is a sign notifying you of such -- but no shops, no billboards, just country side till you cross over a hill and there it is.

The thin wire of highway 19 finally connects with Philadelphia and just a couple of miles over from my mother's parents' farm, now long dead both them and the farm; a mile or two from my parents house, then through town and eight more miles down highway 16 to the Silver Star Casino, the memory of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman only dimly recalled over the ker-chink of quarters droppin' to poppa.

As I'm just a few miles outside of town, dropping past scenery that has dropped past for years, I think how amazing it is -- and agonizing -- to be FROM SOMEWHERE! It's a simple thing but it's staggering when I really think about it and the thought quickly ramifies, as I consider that I was conceived and born here, under some approximation of these stars and electromagnetic flux, born here into a solid, but rapidly dwindling point, like a micro black hole, ungraspable yet also inescapable from its tidal forces. I feel like I'm flashing between poles trying to make sense of this, what often seems to be of no consequence to folks, simple fact.

You go in the casino now and it's like being in any big city, every ethnicity sitting as close as possible to the slots. Prejudice no longer rules but Chance and Capital do, as befits the coming Quantum Society. Even more than with industrial society, with chance operations you see what seems to be a perfect fit, the Casino and the Lottery being the coming forms that will organize culture, the Society of Gaming. When I was a kid I always thought that gambling was either a James Bond type deal, whipping around Monte Carlo in a tux after just having lost/won a bundle or hanging out at the pool hall, hustling for nickeles and dimes. Heck, maybe that's what it WAS thirty years. If so, no more: it's now firmly integrated into the educational establishment first at a base level, that is, the state lottery funds many educational initiatives, just as casinos are powering many Indian reservations now (in Philadelphia the casino is on Chata property)--and in Philadelphia itself it's the only night life/entertainment/bar scene/fancy restaurant for many miles around. In fact, it's still a shock to me to see it sitting there, like some drag queen at the county fair -- of course never mind that s/he's missing a few teeth. Adds a bit of that Flannery O'Conner charm I suppose.

(Speaking of which, I was thumbing through a book of her essays recently and in one she was complaining about the lack of `southern writers' at a conference on/of southern writers, much like a conference of Jewish writers I saw on c-span recently where they were commenting on the same phenomena, that the idea of a specifically Jewish thematic among younger writers seemed to be falling by the wayside. How could it be otherwise? All regional cultures are disappearing, that's not a particularly new phenomena. I certainly feel the pull of a certain `southernness' but in the past I've been mostly appalled at that centripetal force -- and at the centripetal force that all `identity writing' represents...I guess one could legitimately ask whether or not ALL writing is not some form of identity writing.. Certainly deconstruction is a constant twining around that problematic--and, just like a vine, requires those structures in order to operate [though it does seem to me that `deconstruction fantasizes' about the disappearance of those structures -- and therein lie very deep political waters, because it does seem to me that decon. subtends the in-human and the non-human, a problematic that the liberal as well as the conservative would like to go away ... However it's NOT going to go away because deconstruction, thy name is Technology, written with an uncanny quill -- or perhaps a laser.])

And also the combinatoric is allied with coding, DNA being a good example. But that's for another time.
----------------

So sometimes I can't decide (and is it as simple a thing as a decision?), honestly I can't Ms. O'Connor, whether it's a good thing to be FROM SOMEWHERE --what we take to be a blatant inevitability -- or to be a creature from Nowhere, an aim that techno/net/cyber culture seems to shot for. (of course we know that UTOPIA means `nowhere').

I guess the idea is that if you are form somewhere there's always baggage, the past, an anchor slowing you down, slowing down the final arrival of the Quantum State, when the entire population will be quivering in an uncertain start (if nothing else because of Speed), like that cat in Schrodinger's box, uncertain of it's life or death.

I remember Artaud struck delirious by the mystic rock masses climbing out of the Mexican landscape and his speculations on their eldritch effects on the natives, the landscape itself somehow being that ungraspable but inescapable `fact', spitting us out and somehow pulling us back... (all of which is germane to speculations on the Eternal Return and Nietzsche)...It would seem however that the machine is immune to the imprecations of the landscape, mystic or otherwise--and if the eternal return does not somehow reside in the landscape (after all, Nietzsche even at Sils Maria, Heidegger with his grecian temple, me with my buzzing locust in late summer -- good company I keep, eh? --, the pyramids, still whispering to us all over the world [again?] -- then ...where? (of course we do have an `internal landscape', it's called deoxyribonucleic acid.)
-----
There would be times in the past when, as I approached the town, the air would be saturated with images, vignettes, stories, reflectiing dimly off the mist on my eyes, bits and pieces of a past snapping past, disturbing only in their vivacity, occluding almost the roadway...doesn't matter the contents, banal summer's eve, tumbling past childhood incidents, no remembered abductions by little gray aliens, no recalled sexual assaults by deranged or drunken relatives, no terrible bends in the fabric of space and time whch now twist me around, mobius-like, to reface myself and confront my attackers, no sense of necessary vengence, a wrathful victimology curling round and supporting my accusations.

But...I do know now the obsessiveness that such events can bring, the traumatic re-entrances into one's psychic life that it can stage, the delaying tactics, obfuscations, and damages such events can cause, both in the body politic and the individual. But in an odd way there a comfort in such looped events, continually shuttling from present to past, to present, over and over and again, with not only no desire to forget and forgive but an active desire to remember and avenge --- but with no possibility of that redress really. How can one redress the grievances of the past? Eternal returns within eternal returns, wheels within wheels -- and like illness there can be a comfort in that, a weave over a central abyss of the nothing we have constructed our lives over the `top' of (I scare quote it because the strands of the weave itself are made of that `nothing'; constructed of nothing but the difference between b and p as the linguists say), the furious and torturous shuttling of the loom of trauma (and maybe Schopenhauer had it right, that there is something of the nature of a bruise simply in being conscious, even without any extra added grievance and that some are more sensitive to that condition, the so called artistic or poetic sensibility).

Consciousness has to have a certain dammed-up quality, a stoppage and buildup of life's pulsions and flows for it to begin to become an `it', a difference from the rest of the world, a knot tied in the world which somehow knows it's a knot -- and consequently knows it is a not also; perhaps consciousness can be likened to that knot in the shoulders when, under stress, we hold our selves as if in reaction to a coming blow .... after a while the knowledge that we have shoulders phosphoresces into vivid existence and shortly after that, the pain virtually detaches the shoulder from our body -- or with one wishing it could be so detached.

I don't think that one can come to turns with the pain of another's existence until one has grappled with the terms of one's own painful being in the world....in fact since apparently a good deal of human pain is CAUSED by the pain of others who find it necessary to work out their pain upon the body of another (the marquis de Sade would be appropriate here), that would seem to be always a necessary first step. And it could be that even `do-gooders' work out their pain on the body of another, at least in terms of these internal dynamics (from whence comes, perhaps, the old saying to the effect that some of the greatest evils come from those attempting to do good). It certainly seems structurally all to be part of the same phenomena, of some sort of strange unavowed reciprocity.

And there is this also; there is a kind of drama in evil don't you think? A narrative arc that `good' seems to lack and a depth and intensity that good seems to miss out on. Evil (and hence trauma) appeals to a Spectacular Age (which, let's admit it, is every age that the human as we know it has been involved in).

But it does seem true that an age of global electronic representational apparatuses does seem to ramify such effects, to increase certain tensions and intensities, slaking our appetite and increasing it at the same time (for example, there seems to be a diminution in the possibilities of global conflict and an increase in smaller scale tensions, down to the individual level; the decline of war and the rise of really violent video games...)

The thing that most complicates the Socratic maxim to `know thyself' is the human love of the theatrical, the poetic and the lie. And for that matter love itself.
-----
9.12
A brief interlude here at, what? about 5 in the morning is it? A simple question really: is there anything more stupid than a man around a pretty woman? Is there anything more fucked up? All of a sudden judgment goes out the window, any kind of reasonable assessment of a situation becomes completely skewed....
love?
Ha!! what a weird concept...
sex? even weirder...

and then, this morning (and before this damn NIGHT which is now almost DAY) this dream as I was waking up: A phone call left on my message machine; it's L. I can recognize her very distinctive voice, seductive, alluring...I don't know hat she's saying but there is another female voice on the line, both laughing, more like taunting... is there anything more torturous than some women.... or anything more... more...torturously DELICIOUS.

I suspect this is all I want to write for September....

sigh...I'm tired of the Old Kingdom...when does the New Kingdom begin??!
1999

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