I mean, once a devotee offered a length of cloth to Drubthop Chöyung, a prominent disciple of Gampopa’s, and asked for teachings, but was put off. He insisted again and again, til Drubthop Chöyung finally took the man's hands in his and said, “I will die, you will die,” three times. And then added, “That’s all that my guru taught me, and that’s all that I practice. Just meditate on that. I promise there is nothing greater than that.” All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Light and weight, wait, no matter what, and in which spirit, -ice, the suffix, -ice, when ice trines fire. Overflowing, you pour mood and structure, word and margin equally, into two crevices. From here, you can see yourself, long and thin in the brass of the binocular, suspended on a berg between the dewy motion of the glacier and the thrash of the sea, and the Chorus of Spirits’ speech in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.
Travelled o’er by dying gleams;
Be it bright as all between
Cloudless skies and windless streams,
Silent, liquid, and serene;
As the birds within the wind,
As the fish within the wave,
As the thoughts of man’s own mind
Float through all above the grave;
We make there our liquid lair,
Voyaging cloudlike and unpent
Through the boundless element:
the light that reaches us long after a star — in a constant process of compression — has combusted. theory. This doesn’t account however for the apparent absence of the ‘of’ after desire. After that, I would coat the vinyl in one color, lay the new negative conglomerate down, do an eight- to ten-minute exposure, go to my sink, wash out the unexposed color, and do it again with each subsequent color. I always told my students that my main trick was Ajax with a sponge. It was destructive, but it was effective to scrub off some of the color, and then keep building. That was how I got results that were less flat than other people who used the process. Because the base was vinyl, it dried immediately and didn’t shrink, so you could have perfect negative registration for subsequent layers. DAY TWO: Watch the same show with sound off, but flip the cardboard cutout, exposing the lower right corner of the tv screen. DAY THREE: The same as the other days, but with the lower left of the screen exposed. DAY FOUR: The same as the other days, but with the upper left of the screen exposed. DAY FIVE: Shut the screen light off and listen to the show from beginning to end. Which is how I perchanced upon The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History before the clock struck 11, with instructions to knock twice and attend its opening. Wynd was in, as fortune would have it, and I must report he is indeed a most curious gentleman. He greeted me in a suit of pink velvet and was possessed of both a fine beard and a mischievous glint in his eye. I then descended with Wynd to his basement. A half-monkey half-fish hung in wait atop the stairs, suspended from the ceiling, its mouth preserved in some kind of blood-curdling scream. No sooner had we arrived in this darkened lair than Wynd disappeared back upstairs to concoct me a warming beverage of what he said would be liquorice root, while I was permitted to peruse his collection at my leisure. It was a most peculiar assortment: feathers from extinct birds, shrunken human heads, the golden-plated skull of one of Pablo Escobar’s hippopotami, artworks by the great English surrealists, a lock of Elvis Presley’s hair, a syringe found in the very room where Sebastian Horsley died, the skull of a cyclops, portraits of fellating nuns, radioactive seashells, condoms made specifically for the less well-endowed, “and this,” spoke a voice from within the gloom, “is a horse’s stomach that’s been infected with botflies!” This startled me somewhat, because I had not noticed Wynd’s return. “They lay their eggs around the horse’s mouth and then, when it licks them, the eggs go in, the larva hatches, attaches itself to the horse’s stomach and pupates.” He paused and intoned: “You can’t make this stuff up.” I studied Wynd’s expression closely in the murky light. For surely a man of twisted means could make this stuff up, and indeed would, were it to prove successful in providing even modest financial remuneration. I glanced up and noticed a jar resting on a shelf, with its label claiming it contained the faecal matter of a Ms A Winehouse. The specimen, Wynd claimed, aroused the attention of the Human Tissue Authority, who recently paid a visit. This suggestion struck me as preposterous, and my suspicions around Wynd redoubled. We retired to a bench at Wynd’s sarcophagus, the top of which boasted a glass panel through which to view the human remains within. Next to Wynd sat a taxidermied goat a self-portrait, he said, while stroking its face. How did he know how much to offer for such unusual items? “It’s what I’ve got in my bank account that day,” he ventured. “If I can afford it and I want it, then I tend to buy it.” He furrowed his brow. “I was just the other day offered a mummified arm, but I hadn’t €2,000 on me.” Could he not have haggled? “I’m not interested in haggling. And it’s not the end of the world if I can’t get one specific thing. I see the museum more as a three-dimensional novel, a sculpture of the inside of my brain.” Wynd, of course, is the author of a book in more conventional format. In it, he recounts the stories around the items he has amassed: a wooden carving believed to tell the story of a village in which the women spurned the men as lovers for dogs; a tongue-eating louse (“the most disgusting thing in my collection”); even a curious crinkled stone that turns out to be a baked potato Wynd once left in his oven (“I found it rather attractive so I kept it”). He was insistent we see yet more of his objects, including an orchidometer used for the measurement of testicles and a human intestinal worm. Was this tiny basement, I asked myself, where the world’s true magic and wonder resided? But just as I was beginning to fall under my host’s charming spell, my attention was seized by an item of such alarming grotesquery that I tremble even now to recount it in full. For lying beneath a glass display cabinet of bones, toy dolls and sordid literature was a full length, semi-rotting human figure. I leaned towards it cautiously, only to jump back with fright. The left half was unmistakably that of the bass baritone and political activist Mr Paul Robeson. But the right side … well that was … no … surely not … a topless and fishnetted Ms Pamela Anderson. “Ah yes, the Pamela Anderson and Paul Robeson Unification Cake,” explained Wynd, although whether you consider that an explanation, dear reader, I will leave to you. Wynd then recalled how it was created by Magnus Irvin, the same entity who concocted the chocolate anuses sold upstairs. Wynd laughed and, trapped in the darkness, I felt suddenly gripped by a stomach-churning sensation. Whether it was the liquorice brew I’d imbibed or something more sinister, I could not say. But I knew I must leave while I still could. “But you haven’t met Hamlet!” he cried, “nor have you seen the ruminations of Messrs Zizek and Agamben on the novel coronavirus, which I downloaded from the internet!”, at which I fled as fast as my stumbling feet would take me, unable to even bear the thought of those final horrors, which, strangely not strangely, left all his previous ones in the dust, and when I passed the half-monkey half-fish at the top of the stairs, it seemed no longer to be screaming, but to be laughing at the top of its (possibly infected) lungs,
as a crime scene can excite
a drop of lumen to exude its hit of light,
a violent butter,
like a cloud
-seeding-drone,
O fish in flume,
Earth turns on a spit like a gut infloresced
with bad intentions, factory hens,
a Glock, a mouse,
walls don’t work / the very concept of a wall / is insane
as indestructible as the carvings on a tomb yet as transient as cloud writing,
there is a lingering government in this fade
out for pixels may sting,
“trust” blisters,
the sweat on a can of diet soda, I dreamt
that my mother took me to see Snow White
when I was a little child, buckled up in the back seat
it took about four years. It’s ninety-six pages long, so that comes to about two pages per month. I have a line in one piece that says: “My poem that still suffers in the twenty-first century from neurasthenia.” Life often moves too fast for me.
What is the difference between objects and things?
Things, I think, have less personality.
Or do I mean objects?
It was late in the summer of that year that I was taken on vacation by my friend D’s parents. I don’t remember much about the vacation itself — a snapshot of bodysurfing, a faint recollection of falling asleep at a late-night screening of Waterworld — but I do recall the car ride from Philadelphia, particularly the music piping through my cheap headphones: Hole’s Live Through This, Rancid’s Let’s Go!, a sample CD from the College Music Journal featuring songs by Teenage Fanclub and the Circle Jerks. The interstate became clogged and dusty, two-lane, dream-fed on Cinnabon and petroleum byproducts, a stream of consciousness at once revenue stream, live stream, blood stream, click stream, stream dammed to flood and tapped for bottled water. The old transparent eyeball and anaphoric “I” of the pioneer imaginary, profligate as Johnny Appleseed sowing virgin lands with exclamation points,
how cool,
let me lie here in the sun
until my dream’s done
feeling mellow and
the hills are on fire, focus
grouped epilation
and depilation
crawling toddler-like
AC-chilled purgatory
a drive-thru order,
tattooed guillotine —
There is no healing.
There’s no shortening
of the commute,
then my grandma put some butterflies in a jar
and their wings stopped
and we placed their bodies behind glass,
I got beamed into a sad book
Hey. Hi. I was already too old for the Muppets or too ironic or something. Oh, wait. Oh, shit. No, I’m just trying to construct a world that has my apartment as its control center like everybody else here, I guess. Hi. Oh, and I need to fill out a form and go to the supermarket. No, I haven’t finished reading your thing, but I’ll let you know when I have. Hi. Thanks! Hi, hey, yeah, stay positive, man. Or not? Hi. Hi. Nice of everyone to be entertaining everybody for free right now, or attempting to a least. My blog was ahead of its time, laugh laugh. Hi, T! Thanks a lot, pal, and I agree. Hey there, There’s this weird game where you play as a goose that looks kind of nuts. Mucus in My Pineal Gland, for instance. The boys want to be her; the girls want to be her. Braids fly, the hands summon some magical power, while the figure stands, on its own planet, against a night sky of the chaos of stars. Or something like that. Positive feedback loopdi-loops between body and sign, mediated by the internet vector, the pineal is the seat of the soul for Descartes, but in Bataille, is a monstrous eye opening out of the top of the skull onto the blackness that negates the pure expenditure of the sun.
The earthenware itself tells archaeologists and researchers about life in the Jomon period, an era that lasted from 14,000BC until 300BC. But with his images, Tatsuki documents a link to this deep past: he presents these ancient artifacts alongside the newspaper pages in which they had been wrapped and stored away in boxes after having been excavated. The newspaper in the first flat box that I was shown happened to be dated March 13, 2011, just two days after the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred. It features a black-and-white photo of people being served meals at an evacuation shelter — which reminds me that as of this morning the US has 85,906 cases of COVID-19, a number that fails to signify, because we fail to test. I wonder how good old days that number will seem by the time you read this. It is in entering the street that I enter exchange.
I don’t want to apply verbal balm to accelerate the cogs, I
don’t want to put that mush in my mouth
Pink stucco shell, gooey rot center
Are mares really impregnated by the breeze?
A gloved hand extends, offers a
brown banana
The disorder will indeed be televised
A cloud-based living package of commercialized affects
and capital functions
Have you received your perk yet?
Horror was not made in a day
A Snickers stuffed into a hollowed-out pickle
Two-day delivery with Amazon Prime
The scrubs and berries and sidewalk weeds
Moreover, in Hebrew, the term used for “word,” dabar, and that for “desert,” midbar, have the same root: from this, we can assume that it is precisely because the desert is a place deprived of words, that the first thing to do there is to tidy up inside oneself enough to be able to listen. But to listen to what exactly? In the desert there are no streets, no paths that have already been traced out and need only to be followed. It is the task of those who cross it to orient themselves and find their own way. There are no shops, there are no sources of water, there are no plants. Everything appears motionless because in the desert there is no production. There are no bars, and there are no social centers. There is nothing that we would imagine there to be in a place considered “livable.” We can say in the end that there is nothing human, and that is why in the book of Deuteronomy it is said that in the desert, a barren and howling waste, there is a screaming loneliness. I know very well that a great part of this time we are living through seems to be made essentially of this screaming. The music that falls in the early evening from Italy’s balconies these days does not manage to cover this scream — the scream covers everything. In fact, after the euphoria of the first days, this ritual is already disappearing: many understand that it doesn’t sound quite right. Changing the scream into a song depends on our tuning ourselves to the event. In this precise moment, each one of us lives their own trial. The desert is therefore the place that allows one to meditate concretely on one’s own life in the world, starting from a place outside the world, in the truest sense. Free of the superfluous, of all that we believed was necessary, but we now know is not, because it never was. Conversely, the desert makes us feel the desire for everything that is truly missing from our lives. Along the path that we painfully struggle to open up within it, we then experience the absence of true community, true justice, and true health. A thirst for love, for bodhicitta? It must be said, yes, in every possible sense. Out of one dream, another dream is born:
Are you well? I mean, are you alive?
How did you know I was just this moment laying my head on your knee to sleep?
Because you woke me up when you stirred in my belly. I knew then I was your coffin. Are you alive? Can you hear me?
Does it happen much, that you are awakened from one dream by another, itself the interpretation of the dream?
Here it is, happening to you and to me. Are you alive?
Almost.
And have the devils cast their spell on you?
I don’t know, but in time there’s room for death.
Don’t die completely.
I’ll try not to.
Don’t die at all.
I’ll try not to.
Tell me, when did it happen? I mean, when did we meet?
When did we part?
Thirteen years ago.
Did we meet often?
Twice: once in the rain, and again in the rain. The third time, we didn’t meet at all. I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming.
Three o’clock. Daybreak riding on fire. A nightmare coming from the sea. Roosters made of metal. Smoke. Metal preparing a feast for metal the master, and a dawn that flares up in all the senses before it breaks. A roaring that chases me out of bed and throws me into this narrow hallway. I want nothing, and I hope for nothing. I can’t direct my limbs in this pandemonium. No time for caution, and no time for time. If I only knew if I knew how to organize the crush of this death that keeps pouring forth. If only I knew how to liberate the screams held back in a body that no longer feels like mine from the sheer effort spent to save itself in this uninterrupted chaos of shells. “Enough!” “Enough!” I whisper, to find out if I can still do anything that will guide me to myself and point to the abyss opening in six directions. What if this inferno were to take a five-minute break, and then come what may? Just five minutes! I almost say, “Five minutes only, during which I could make my one and only preparation and then ready myself for life or death.” Will five minutes be enough? Yes. Enough for me to sneak out of this narrow hallway, open to bedroom, study, and bathroom with no water, open to the kitchen, into which for the last hour I’ve been ready to spring but unable to move. I’m not able to move at all. Two hours ago I went to sleep. I plugged my ears with cotton and went to sleep after hearing the last newscast. It didn’t report I was dead. That means I’m still alive. I examine the parts of my body and find them all there. Two eyes, two ears, a long nose, ten toes below, ten fingers above, a finger in the middle. As for the heart, it can’t be seen, and I find nothing that points to it except my extraordinary ability to count my limbs. The conclusion is, I’m alive; or, more accurately, I exist. No one pays heed to the wish I send up with the rising smoke: I need five minutes to place this dawn, or my share of it, on its feet and prepare to launch into this day born of howling. What do I want? I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being. The aroma of coffee so I can stand my share of this dawn up on its feet. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough for me to stand before the stove by the glass facade that overlooks the sea. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn like
twilight distant rockets all the light left
on a dying star. Sad frosted voices. Just
listen to them:
So many
actors on the evening wind
the lake like bits of silver paper in the
wind hard across the golf course remember
your brother and Pershing Avenue
used to be Berlin Avenue changed it to
Pershing Avenue during the war well remember
a young cop whistling ‘Annie
Laurie’ down past time drew September
17, 1899 over New York. Fresh southerly
winds a long time ago.
Reversed negatives and
all that. Now some of these negatives
you see here (Just put on these infrared
Seeds you might say. Didn’t you plant
that
Where I came in. Don’t ask
questions for about three know.
Memories of thee
dost I
thou mem, one
mem mems how many things
items, remember things? The soul suckers recall careers, sal’ries —
prizes like cold grass grows on hackneyed thoughts
one tolerates this triste confusion
where it lies visible, to one’s grey eyes. Or brown as birds. Extinct
on all walls sing the sky. When is that, of life soul-suck, where’s on top?
Nothing varies but the light
in 3, a as to the text, in 3, in its quadruple aspect, (: :)
twice =8 (proving that it is that)
or, put another way, The Mahavamsa reports that when Buddhaghosa had completed the Visuddhimagga, devas intervened and hid his work, forcing him thereby to write it again. Once he had completed the task for a second time, the devas again took away the fruits of his labours, so that he had to write it a third time. Once he had finished the third version, the devas restored the other two copies. Upon examination, it was found that the three versions did not differ from each other at all so VIVE LA REVOLUTION! — not the settlement of state seizure so the subsequent scare-quote successes of Cromwell and Washington all those French people and Lenin and Mao turn out to be precisely not-revolutionary in the very senses usually taken as legit and the early instances turn out to be merely mixed models meaning (will we ever think outside the Hexagon?) the cut perishes as outrageous singular experimentation with its proselytizers) has fully flailed in the fleeking face of excrescent technocapitalist globalization in which — I say! — vast dystopian sci-fi non-states like Alibaba and Amazon and Facebook and Google and Twitter and WeChat, etcetera squatting with their vast electronic buttocks over the seven point five billion — I had not thought Life had UNDONE SO MANY, but, well, there you are, ejecting an excrementious-electronicist-accelerationist hail of earth-exterminating acids so that (prop. 1) on Cloud 9, and — jeezus — why why why does ‘does this even have to be said’ even have to be said? —
the more you
give the more
they take
those telecharged turbotic terroroids of our non de terre [ecocidal nobiliary particles]
[exactly like Freud sez of the superego that vile blackmailer], so that (prop. 2), iii) and oh do go on … iv) and because poetry vitiates possibility; it is clear that in our neoliberal eden, (eat this shit or starve),
which I fear is why even diehards no longer believe
in the labour theory of value at this ‘moment’
(would you prefer I used the word ‘conjuncture’
at this conjuncture for theoretical reasons?)
for OMG it is the time of the final expropriation
— of the representational capacities of human beings
— of the reproductive capacities of human beings
— of the resistant capacities of human beings
so that land-body-word are all enclosed by
the absolute and infinite reterritorialization
effected by the goon squads because
CIVILIZATION IS THE CLACKER and THE HUMAN
IS WASTE and WE LOVE PLASTIC SO MUCH while braying
Oh yes! — with pull-quotes — Oh yes I said yes! yes! I — such as
so that (prop. 3) what was I talking about?
A friend of mine tells me that back home they talk about the ‘communovirus.’ How could we not have thought of that already? It’s so obvious! And what an admirable and complete ambivalence: a virus coming from a country that according to its leader embodies ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ but which scares the hell out of anyone who isn’t nuts, a virus that communizes us in a way that nothing else ever has. It essentially puts us on more of a basis of equality than any revolution ever has. That this has to involve the isolation of each of us is simply a paradoxical way of experiencing our community. In a way, this is an excellent catch-up session: we find that it really is true that we are not solitary animals. The sudden rise in phone calls, emails and other social flows also shows a pressing need, a fear of losing contact. Does this mean we are in a better position to reflect on community than we were before? Listen to this poem by WG Sebald that Jackie Wang just posted and let me know. (The Isenheim Altarpiece by Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald, 1512–1516):
on the first of October the moon’s shadow
slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg
over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,
and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch
with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,
will have travelled to see this event of the century,
awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,
so will have become a witness to
the secret sickening away of the world,
in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk
in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit
poured through the vault of the sky,
while over the banks of mist and the cold
heavy blues of the clouds
a fiery red arose, and colors
such as his eyes had not known
radiantly wandered about, never again to be
driven out of the painter’s memory.
These colors unfold as the reverse of
the spectrum in a different consistency
of the air, whose deoxygenated void
in the gasping breath of the figures
on the central Isenheim panel is enough
to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which
comes the mountain landscape of weeping
in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze
into the future has prefigured
a planet utterly strange, chalk-colored
behind the blackish-blue river.
Which is to say that a few nights ago, I got into bed and slipped into a hypnagogic state in which my unconscious brain seemed to be both synthesizing and regurgitating images I had consumed earlier in the week. I saw flashes of Donald Trump, which makes sense, as his skin, eyes, mouth, and hair represent a large percentage of the visual stream I bathe in every time I pick up a digital rectangle made of sand or an analog rectangle made of trees. I saw Jim and Pam from The Office, which also makes sense, as I watched an episode right before turning out the light. I saw a replay of a bad interaction I had with a friend. And then, slightly more surprisingly, I saw the Byzantine emperor Leo III; or more accurately, I saw the poorly scanned portrait of him that the Google algorithm first spits out if you search his name. He spoke to me, but before I could figure out what he was saying, I went all the way out. Leo III ruled from 717–741 CE. After an enormous volcanic eruption in the Aegean Sea in 726 CE caused tsunamis, destruction, and death in his kingdom, he concluded that his people’s misfortune was a judgment from God for their veneration of images. He saw the disaster as a punishment for a pervasive societal disregard for the second commandment, which appears on Wikipedia — via the Church of England via Moses via Yahweh — as, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under the earth.” I suspect Leo found his way into my mind’s eye — appearing in the search results of my cognitive algorithm — because we’re living in a moment that would, no doubt, have him pretty freaked out. I mean, if you had visited Daniel Arnold’s show 1:21, curated by Emily Rosser, at Larrie gallery in New York City last fall, it would become potentially obvious that God, and Leo just might have gotten it wrong. Or at least that humans now use the inauthenticity of the copy to prove the authenticity of the real thing. The salient effect is a kind of democratic vista, a celebration of our collective, miraculous nature that reads like Julie Andrews singing “The Sound of Music” from an Austrian mountaintop, except, in this case, the mountaintop is on the Lower East Side, and Andrews is hoodie-wearing insomniac with an iPhone addiction. There are many photographers working in this vein today, celebrating or trying to create or whatever a miraculous collective identity, seeking, as Arnold quoted Whitman in the show, “A language that everyone can sing in together.” I’m still or once again or whatever talking about the “communovirus” apparently. In that weird way poets have of surprising themselves. Or maybe I was alluding to this thing that’s going around, from one art institution to the next, I dunno. How am I supposed to know? “To: @LACMA, @MOCAlosangeles, @hammer_museum, @gettymuseum. We hope this bright splash of color, courtesy of @JeffKoons, brightens your day 💐 #MuseumBouquet Love, All the staff at The Broad”
Or maybe this poem by my friend Scott would be more appropriate:
Or one could put it like this: two years ago, a friend stated that, “the constitutive heterogeneity of the real is given to us under the mask of unity, homogeneous unity. To superficial perception, the mask is the real itself. To allow the mask to falter, is therefore to risk vertigo.” In January, this mask still resembled the form it had assumed in recent years: a tumultuous but for the most part intelligible field of global political polarizations. The world, and our place within it, still felt within reach. By March, the ruling institutions had been forced into a roundly reactive posture. It is by no means clear that the Coronavirus can be compared to a typical economic crisis or natural disaster, nor has the response been limited to an ordinary state of exception. After all, at least for a moment, rulers and ruled alike were pushed on to the back foot, their certainties shaken, as the virus usurped the position of global antagonist. Institutions on which the reproduction of this world depends have been perfunctorily suspended: employment, imprisonment for misdemeanors, evictions … The dislocation of the social fabric has been far deeper than anything we have known. The veneer of normalcy fell away at a shocking speed. Actions that were once the very substance of normalcy now feel like experiments. And if we are honest, the ethical and political lines are not exactly what they used to be. Three months ago, what concerned us and much of the world was the tally of forty-seven countries: the newspapers announced “a new global wave of revolt.” From France to Hong Kong, riots, occupations and blockades erupted with a ferocity and longevity unknown in living memory. Successful revolts do not only undermine existing powers — they also allow their participants a capacity to participate more fully in the world. If we have come to think of revolt as a destituent force, this is not only because revolt splinters and fragments the social fabric into asymmetrical camps, but also because it returns us to earth, placing us in contact with reality. Destitution is rightly thought of either as a double movement or as a single process with two sides. On the one hand, it refers to the emptying-out of the fictions of government (its claim to universality, impartiality, legality, consensus); on the other hand, a restoration of the positivity and fullness of experience. The two processes are linked like the alternating sides of a Möbius strip: wherever those usually consigned to existing as spectators upon the world (the excluded, the powerless) instead suddenly become party to their situation, active participants in an ethical polarization, the ruling class is invariably drawn into the polarization and cannot avoid exhibiting its partisan character. The police become one more gang among gangs. Needless to say, our situation today is different. We are living through a halfway destitution, a destitution interrupted. Every party has returned to earth – yet without entering a world. The advent of COVID-19 has drained standard narratives and roles of their force. The logics holding this world together have been revealed as the arbitrary and mechanical operations that they are. Yet because it was neither “we” nor “they” who pulled the e-brake, but a perfectly inhuman virus, the standstill of historical time lacks the festival that usually accompanies it — the collective intelligence and confidence that comes with being the agent plunging normal time into disorder. In the absence of an agent, the truth of this moment remains stubbornly negative: our lives materially prostrate to supply chains as far flung as they are brittle, our world a conduit of reciprocally perilous immunity and disease. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, participants in political events are never solely agents, but always also patients at the same time — we affect and are affected, we are changed by what we do and what is done to us, whether by police or one another. To have an active hand in our own deposition, to become anyone by participating in a common power with no name, is the mark of those movements and moments of eruption we’ve felt close to over recent years. By contrast, our one-sided passivity in the face of this global event generates a vertiginous sense of being outpaced by the change around us. To be patients but not agents has meant that the dislocation of social life has occurred at a speed that makes it all but impossible to metabolize. In their 1956 text, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman observe that the subversive power of a détournement is “directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.” This dependency of subversion on the memory of the subverted is not limited to the case of art but is, they argue, merely “a particular case of a general law” applicable to all action upon the world. If the radical interruption of normal life we are undergoing has been so disorienting, this is because it is unfolding like a botched détournement, one whose force or potential is neutralized by its very radicality. We are swept into the new with such disarming speed that we cannot recall what preceded it. The tissue of normal life has been punctured, yet the cancellation was so rapid that we have been unable to register the distance traveled between the “original contents” of normal life and the world we now inhabit: a violence too sudden, too terrible even to be liberating, numbs us to the subversive effects it nevertheless carries out. The upending of the world becomes pacified, reduced to a disorienting and disempowering experience: an inhuman velocity, less an event than a jump-cut, an excision of memory, a vertical severing of time itself. In the long run, the vertigo will settle who knows what. Meanwhile, we float in an empty time; unable to seize upon and decide it, we wait for the suspension of I don’t know what to call it to come to an end. However, as Furio Jesi understood well, suspended time often requires a “cruel sacrifice” before it can conclude itself. If our only experience of this event is as a “blip” of confusion and panic amidst an unbroken chain of administered life, when the time finally comes for an imperial reboot, the reversion to normalcy (or worse) will find no argument or exteriority to oppose it. That we remain dazed and out of step with the world gives our enemies free reign to reintroduce historical time on terms amenable uniquely to them, as the recent murders of activists during the quarantine lockdown in Colombia have already begun to attest. For now — at least for a moment—we are all here on earth, in the desert of collective uncertainty:
To have been on earth just once — that’s irrevocable. / And so we keep on going and try to realize it, try to hold it in our simple hands, in our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart. (Rilke)
The Colombia reference is to the way death squads are exploiting the lockdown to kill activists, by the way.
[Note: JBR; Khyentse Rinpoche, quoted in “The benefits of meditating on impermanence”, at > Matthieu Ricard; John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (memory quote); Himali Singh Soin, “Justice”, quoted in Ignota, “22 Moons: Justice”, email rec’d 23 Mar 020, approx. 12:59pm PDT; Bea Nettles, quoted in Cat Lachowskyj, “Harvest of Nature”, at Lens Culture, mid-March 020; CA Conrad, “Quarter View”, at (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, 22 Mar 020; JBR; Tim Jonze, “Viktor Wynd: ‘I was offered a mummified arm — but I didn't have €2,000 on me’”, at Guardian, 16 Mar 020; JBR (those two old used up philosophers really have written on the COVID-19 pandemic …); Joyelle McSweeney, Lonely Christopher, Elaine Equi, Ted Rees, Laura Theobald, Dennis Cooper, and others, quoted in Cooper’s “5 poetry books I read recently & loved: Joyelle McSweeney Toxicon and Arachne, Lonely Christopher In a January Would, Elaine Equi The Intangibles, Ted Rees Thanksgiving: A Poem, Laura Theobald KOKOMO”, at DC’s, 20 Mar 020; McKenzie Wark, “Reality Cabaret: On Juliana Huxtable”, at e-flux, Mar 2020; Stephen Gill, The Pillar, at Nobody Books; blurb for Masaru Tatsuki, Kakera, quoted in shashasha Web Store, “NEWSLETTER｜27 March 2020”, email rec’d 27 Mar 020, approx. 3:11am PDT; JBR, 27 Mar 020, approx. 7:51am PDT; Alli Warren, “Moveable C”, in Little Hill; Marcello Tarì, “A Letter to Friends of the Desert” (tr. Keelan O’Sullivan), at Ill Will Editions, 26 Mar 020; Mahmoud Darwish (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi), quoted in Pierre Joris, “Mahmood Darwish: Opening Pages of ‘Memory of Forgetfulness’”, at Nomadics, 27 Mar 020; cover of Anselm Hollo, Heads to Appear on the Stands (could be WS Burroughs); Alice Notley, For the Ride; Stéphane Mallarmé, The Book (tr. Sylvia Gorelick),quoted in Marcella Durand, “Stéphane Mallarmé Created an Ideal Book Never Meant to Be Published”, at Hyperallergic, 28 Mar 020; JBR; Anālayo, “The Treatise on the Path to Liberation (解脫道論) and the Visuddhimagga”, at Universität Hamburg, Numata Zentrum für Buddhismuskunde; JBR; Justin Clemens, “Just Come Now”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 29 Mar 020; JBR; Jean-Luc Nancy, “Communovirus”, at Verso Blog, 27 Mar 020; JBR; WG Sebald, “(The Isenheim Altarpiece by Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald, 1512–1516)”, quoted in Jackie Wang, “W.G. Sebald on the solar eclipse of 1502”, at Giulia Tofana the Apothecary, 29 Mar 020; JBR; a Gideon Jacobs, “Drawing with Light: Photographic Modernism in Our Postmodern Dystopia”, at BOMB, 31 Mar 020; JBR; Grace Ebert, “Art Museums and Cultural Institutions Around the Globe are Sending Each Other Virtual Bouquets and Botanicals”, at Colossal, 31 Mar 020; JBR; Scott Ezell; JBR; August and Kora, “Destitution, Interrupted”, at Ill Will Editions, 29 Mar 020]
