I think about the bloody show, home birth, touch a faux emerald brooch, think about how doulas discuss the quality of cervical mucus, how placenta looks like a cow’s soft brain when exposed to a pig’s hysterical hormones, think about how our cows’ genetically altered cells scramble the field of American eggs into hot dogs, how everyone eats with four stomachs. Mercantile empiricists and acrobat-intellectuals, fluid nomads and viscous losers, Robinsons on wheels, Turbo-Bécassines and Cyber-Gideons … and the fish stop their night-chant, tired of mouthing modernist scores, eager for a warrior-like epic of the great Black Fish Quest – that they are the dark matter that keeps us from flying apart, the bone structure of this multiverse, slowly congealing, thank you for thirty years of service. Spread over both of Abreu’s locations, the “sculptures,” a term which Moulène himself disavows, appear like amputated bits of absent, impossible bodies: I mean, a bone is suspended in mid-air, an inflated flesh-colored balloon protruding from it. In the main gallery, a series of concrete heads (cast from the inside of Halloween masks) lie on blankets, their partially effaced features reminiscent of … uh … I have no idea. They are splayed out on the floor in rows and sit on blue blankets, the kind often found in galleries to cover works of art that are being prepared for transportation. Afterwards the midwives drew me a bath of healing flowers. It was awesome, as we say here. Okay. Was the story any good? I have to physically sling obit. Sorry, autocorrect. Okay. Let’s see if I can practice a tantric containment. And like a slow motion lobster wearing French perfume. After downloading mind mapping software, Coggle. Like a braised toddler. This is a photo T accidentally took of his fingertip. The missing A descends below the sentence to the place beneath language where the images are still dreaming; never mind their skill at the cithara or their bondage in the land of the Egyptians. Say then that the idea of it pre-dates the Ziggurat of Ur or the Olmec Heads or “ostrich plume ginger”. Say then that the world is thinkable according to the system of non-knowledge. This is according to the bells on the leather saddle strapped to the horse you rode across the Chinese tundra, feeling oddly yet a lot like Arion being saved by that dolphin. “I have seen what I have seen.” I mean,
The ship landed in Scios,
men wanting spring-water,
And by the rock-pool a young boy loggy with vine-must,
“To Naxos? Yes, we’ll take you to Naxos,
Cum’ along lad.” “Not that way!”
“Aye, that way is Naxos.”
And I said: “It’s a straight ship.”
And an ex-convict out of Italy
knocked me into the fore-stays,
(He was wanted for manslaughter in Tuscany)
And the whole twenty against me,
Mad for a little slave money.
And they took her out of Scios
And off her course...
And the boy came to, again, with the racket,
And looked out over the bows,
and to eastward, and to the Naxos passage.
God-sleight then, god-sleight:
Ship stock fast in sea-swirl,
Ivy upon the oars, King Pentheus,
grapes with no seed but sea-foam,
Ivy in scupper-hole.
Aye, I, Acœtes, stood there,
and the god stood by me,
Water cutting under the keel,
Sea-break from stern forrards,
wake running off from the bow,
And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk,
And tenthril where cordage had been,
grape-leaves on the rowlocks,
Heavy vine on the oarshafts,
And, out of nothing, a breathing,
hot breath on my ankles,
Beasts like shadows in glass,
a furred tail upon nothingness.
Lynx-purr, and heathery smell of beasts,
where tar smell had been,
Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,
eye-glitter out of black air.
The sky overshot, dry, with no tempest,
Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,
fur brushing my knee-skin,
Rustle of airy sheaths,
dry forms in the æther.
And the ship like a keel in ship-yard,
slung like an ox in smith’s sling,
Ribs stuck fast in the ways,
grape-cluster over pin-rack,
void air taking pelt.
Lifeless air become sinewed,
feline leisure of panthers,
Leopards sniffing the grape shoots by scupper-hole,
Crouched panthers by fore-hatch,
And the sea blue-deep about us,
green-ruddy in shadows,
And Lyæus: “From now, Acœtes, my altars,
Fearing no bondage,
fearing no cat of the wood,
Safe with my lynxes,
feeding grapes to my leopards,
Olibanum is my incense,
the vines grow in my homage.”
The back-swell now smooth in the rudder-chains,
Black snout of a porpoise
where Lycabs had been,
Fish-scales on the oarsmen.
And I worship.
I have seen what I have seen.
When they brought the boy I said:
“He has a god in him,
though I do not know which god.”
And they kicked me into the fore-stays.
I have seen what I have seen:
Medon’s face like the face of a dory,
Arms shrunk into fins. And you, Pentheus,
Had as well listen to Tiresias, and to Cadmus,
or your luck will go out of you.
Fish-scales over groin muscles,
lynx-purr amid sea...
And of a later year,
pale in the wine-red algæ,
If you will lean over the rock,
the coral face under wave-tinge,
Rose-paleness under water-shift,
Ileuthyeria, fair Dafne of sea-bords,
The swimmer's arms turned to branches,
Who will say in what year,
fleeing what band of tritons,
The smooth brows, seen, and half seen,
now ivory stillness.
Dude might have been an antisemitic fascist asswipe, but fuck me, that’s good. Anyway, it didn’t cohere, but how could it? I met Claudia Rankine in a parking lot after a reading, where I said crazy fan things like, “I think we see the same thing.” She read a book of mine and wrote me, “Reading it was like weirdly hearing myself think.” This exchange is different from a celebration of intersubjectivity: neither of us believes in that. Too much noise of racism, misogyny, impatience, and fantasy to weed out. Too much unshared lifeworld — not just from the difference that racial experience makes but also in our relations to queerness, to family, to sickness and to health, to poverty and wealth. Plus, it takes forever to get to know someone. Not only is God dead, so too is ecology, that pantheistic place God went into hiding. The biosphere is no longer a self-correcting homeostatic deity. I would like to feel like Nietzsche’s madman in the marketplace, saying such things. Yet as Leonard Cohen once memorably put it: everybody knows. But what is knowing? I forgot you were the altar that made me stay…. I forgot the night was unanimous…. I forgot I was not an immigrant…. I forgot how detachment includes. I forgot how detachment enabled a white rattlesnake to penetrate my dreams…. I forgot learning to appreciate rust…. forgot one can use color to prevent encounters from degenerating into lies…. forgot learning to appreciate rust, and how it taught me how bats operate through radar…. I forgot…. According to Jussi Parikka, in The Anthrobscene, 36% of all tin, 25% of cobalt, 15% of palladium, 15% of silver, 9% of gold, 2% of copper and 1% of aluminum goes into media tech.
Or, as Moten puts it, “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” But what is knowing? These lizards are the things of nightmares. They hoard rocks, kill the rock people who eat the rocks, they are young and wriggle like worms, they flip with swords in their hands, living on the fire beneath their clawed feet, breathing that fire in and out, they roll into lava, they will always matter because they will be affected by the outcome of what you do. Somewhere, somebody is waiting for you to find them with these masks and it is your job to find them, thinking, by analogy, of fossilized plants, we sway in the hatchery, the capitalization of “Morning” was originally Keats’ doing – in a letter to a friend, giving thanks to daybreak for cleaning his state of mind – tenderness is a kind of touch. Noting the arrival of the cyanotype, an early photographic tool used by Anna Atkins to catalogue algae, lapsing species become, for a moment, ghosts, place-faithful, they persist after the end of their environments. I don’t know / the Arawak / or the Carib / name for / peacock flower. No one does anymore. Now where are they? (It might be better being one big tetra instead of one little one.) Next day Ed took a job in the cafeteria. Hmmm. One could even say that what the Hegel / Marx connection was to a previous generation — animating the writings of Adorno, Sartre, Lukács, etc. — the Marx / Spinoza connection is to a current collection of philosophers ranging from Althusser, and the members of his circle such as Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, to Antonio Negri, Warren Montag, and Hasana Sharp. As Frédéric Lordon writes, “The temporal paradox is that, although Marx comes after Spinoza, it is Spinoza who can now help us fill the gaps in Marx.” The gaps concern a problem Marx poses, but never completely resolves: Why, and how, do workers return to work each day? If labor power drives the entire capitalist economy, then what is it that motivates individuals to continue to sell their labor power? Lordon believes the answer can be found in Spinoza’s theory of desire, of the conatus that constitutes an individual’s striving, and the affects that define it. In Lordon’s approach to the Spinoza / Marx relation there are echoes of Spinoza’s fundamental political question, “Why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” coupled with Marx’s basic critique of the alienation of capitalism. It is a question of knowing why people will continue to work for a system that fucks them over. The answer is obvious: because they don’t want to be dead.
[Note: Sources: Sandra Simonds, “Shopping Mall Pastoral”, “Commemorative Gift”, in The Sonnets; blurb for Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market (tr. Robin Mackay), at Sequence Press; Pierre Joris, “Dream Anguish Give”, in Barzakh; Alexander Shulan, “Jean-Luc Mouléne Torture Concrete”, at The Brooklyn Rail, 5 Nov 014; JBR; Bhanu Kapil, “bLOG HITUS”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 11 Dec 014; Mark McMorris, “Artifact of Beginnings”, “A Place Made of Thought”, “Another Poem on Nudes”, “Practical Green Table”, quoted in PEN American Center, “PEN Poetry Series: Mark McMorris”, email rec’d 12 Dec 014 approx 8:02 AM PST; JBR (the system of non-knowledge is a reference to Bataille’s Summa Atheologica); Ezra Pound, Canto II; JBR; Lauren Berlant, “Claudia Rankine”, at BOMB 129; McKenzie Wark, “Anthropo{mise-en-s}cène”, at Public Seminar, 10 Dec 014; JBR; Eileen R Tabios, “Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole”, at Entropy, 11 Dec 014; image: “horzion_zero [sic]”, at Archive Fire, 12 Dec 014 (cancelled post); ??, and Fred Moten, in text image embedded in “Racial hierarchies are not rational …”, at Elderly, 11 Dec 014; JBR; Maggie Sullivan, “Flash Portraits of Link: Part 4 – Through Fire and Water”, at Entropy, 12 Dec 014; Ryan Pratt and Julie Joosten, quoted in Pratt’s “Ryan Pratt on Julie Joosten: Light Light”, at Lemon Hound, 12 Dec 014; Jack Kimball, “Now where are they?”, at Pantaloons, 12 Dec 014; Jason Read, “Of Labor and Human Bondage: Spinoza, Marx, and the “Willing Slaves” of Capitalism”, at Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 Dec 014]
Comments