Fish In the Afternoon

The animal is poor in world, it somehow possesses less. But less of what? Less in respect of what is accessible to it, of whatever as an animal it can deal with, of whatever it can be affected by as an animal, of whatever it can relate to as a living being. Less as against more, namely as against the richness of all those relationships that human Dasein has at its disposal.

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, §46

Adapted from a paper for a Heidegger course.

Harriett is a duck. I met her during a depression spell, wandering aimlessly next to the Potomac. I started visiting her because she has a hurt wing, jutting out at an acute angle and preventing her from flying. Concerned, I walked an hour-and-a-half multiple times a week to check on her, to see if she’s eating, if she’s socializing, if she’s having any trouble living her best duck life now. This practice was intended as an act of loving-care, attending to her in the ways appropriate to a duck, and I interpreted her swimming to meet me as cross-species recognition, quacking “I know you” even without the locution. Through it all, Harriett persevered, a duck-on-a-mission, swimming-about and making a life for herself among the Mallards of the Potomac. The last time I saw her, she was healthier than before, defiantly waddling through the river’s pollution, building a coven of friends, and savoring every corn kernel that comes her way.

Harriett is and acts and becomes, unfolding the form-of-life that she inhabits. To unfold is to enact one’s agency in the world repeatedly, dancing the rhythm of being that matters the world. Being buzzes with beings that are -there and -with, always-already situated within a pluricosmos of overlapping and interweaving worlds, meanings and matterings appearing in the unfolding. Drawing from Heidegger, this unfolding depends on the project or pursuit that the creature takes up, orienting themselves to the world as that which they are and marking things in the world as occasions for, or which draw us into, action. For Heidegger, this creature is Dasein, the being-there that asks-and-nervously-answers the question of being; however, I call it the Unique, that which is itself-in-itself and irreplaceable with any other, the matter that matters the world. The Unique forms a world through inhabiting a world, matterings cascading out into the ontology of the cosmos, the Unique of all reflecting the Unique of each.

What does a duck do? Does a duck do? Are the entities in the world significant for a duck? Do they matter? Do they help in the project of ducking? How does one duckily do in the world? It certainly seems if you throw a few grains of corn into the river that it solicits the ducks to eat, that the kernels show up to the ducks as “that which a duck like me eats.” The moment the grains ripple the water, the ducks turn and wade towards it, recognizing it as a delicious feature of their duckish life. Not everything in the Potomac solicits in this way or appears in a duck life as appropriate for a duck – the corn appears as something-to-be-eaten precisely because it is something-to-be-eaten by a duck. It is living life as a duck that causes the corn to appear as it does. Does this mean that ducks have projects or life pursuits like Heidegger’s Dasein? Well, they certainly pursue the corn, and they try to continue living life in a way that is particular to a duck, ducking through their everyday life in a way that changes what things are for. The project of a duck is to live this life, to dwell in the form-of-life of ducks. Ducks do as ducks do, and, in this doing, they constitute a duckish world, a world where things appear as for and not-for ducking.

A duck thus does as Dasein does in ducking. A duck takes up a duck-life through being-in-the-world as a duck. In this ducking, the world becomes the world-for-a-duck, affording opportunities for waddling and wading and flying and eating and doing whatever it is that ducks do when we’re not looking. Harriett’s hurt wing prevents her from flying, blocking the potential for entities to show up as to-be-flown-from, but she still glides and wades, ducking-on in a way particular to Harriett’s unique duckishness. Duck-worlds are not all the same but depend on how individual ducks take up and pursue the project of ducking in the world. Each duck must still learn to duck-in-the-world, and this opens a world that is both grounded in the pursuit of being a duck and in the particularities of being that duck, not just generic duckishness. Harriett finds herself thrown into the world a bird with a broken wing, but every day, she ducks-on. She projects herself onto the possibilities in the world and seeks to live life as a duck, acting on and with things in a way conditioned both by her duckishness and the way she is thrown into that duckishness and into the world. We ourselves human every day. The bee bees, the duck ducks, and the human humans, but being beings in all of them, constituting a world through the project of animaling as the animal-that-one-is, one’s species-being.

A year ago I started visiting Harriett as an act of loving-care. To love another is to attend to their unfolding as that which they are. As what she is, Harriett unfolds a world as she unfolds herself in it, matter mattering matter. To care-for and care-about Harriett is therefore to care for her as the unfolding life that she is. It means attending to the world that she makes and making it possible for her to unfold her life as a duck. Harriett is Unique, and so are the creatures that she is -with, both human and non-human. Caring for each is caring for the Unique that they are, and caring for the Unique that they are means making it possible for them to unfold their life-project, to animal. Recognizing non-humans as Uniques invites us into a new ecological ethic, to prevent ontocide through attending to the world that the Unique is and creates, a pluricosmos of different beings-in-the-world that imbue the universe with mattering.

All worlds are full of Uniques, and Harriett and I are two. I Unique in my humaning and her in her ducking, and just as her presence helped me to human-on when humaning felt untenable, so I have a responsibility to her in her ducking, to be the duck that she is. Harriett is Unique, and so am I, together in this world of beings-in-their-worlds, making the many-worlds together.

All things are full of gods.

Thales of Miletus, quoted in Aristotle’s De Anima 411a

Image: Harriett by me (2023)

We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history. – Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

We poetry. In motion, we sway meaning, significance. Significant. To matter to. I am here, ghost-in-flesh mattering being. You are here, angel-in-presence emerging a new mattering. Meeting you, I inhabit a new world, a ma that stretches between us, a time-ing of our memory, forming-together the history of us. I kneel in the soil of our love; I tend for you. To -tend. Love is attending to the unfolding of another. To attend is to tend-to. To tend-to is to en-home our activity, to relinquish our power and to instead unfold mutually, equally, Uniques togethering rather than directing. To together is to intimate. Intimate. Familiar, close, known, within, inside. We intimate by patterning our lives with one another, dancing our everyday head-to-chest, just you and me, to softly eternity.

We ensoul our lives already-here, in history. Animating, we wander the otherthinkers, the them that measure and quantify, the imagined One. This One has never existed, but emerges in our patterning, the psychic residue of the struggle of history, the agon where matterings clash. The Leviathan is an imagined One; an unspoken Father that reimagines creation in its own image and barks out this image to the world. There is no such thing as a woman or a man. There is woman-ing and man-ing, two kinds of mattering-in-the-world. But each of these matterings is a tree of infinite branches, ways of woman-ing and man-ing that are as Unique as the Uniques that compose it. And outside these trees lie many other groves, many other ways of gender-ing. We are in the wilds following a dead king. We are free.

She jazzes. Ballets kindness, pinks wisdom, flowers beauty. My sunshine, my soil, the garden who gardens me. I was a mountain when I met you. Honeyapple shoe-tapping the awaiting, I wait. Seeing you, my breath repeats and hums hallelujah, heart-skipping Seraphim my angel graces. Time appears when two or more are gathered, re-membering our being-here; being-here with you I intend and attend-to a new future, your walnut sugarcane eyes welcoming home. En-home-ing. Gently, we unwrap our placetime in the hills, two autos in solar orbiting, rollerskating into our unfolding togethering. Rejoice, join, rejoin, rejoice. The Unique in me nests tenderly with the Unique in you. I tend-to-you. Hello, joy, we kitty dearly our desires, Daniel and the lion’s den. We holydwell en-animation, strawberrysouling the sapien earth. Holding one another, we dream the coming Ark, climbing Ararat and descending into bed a reincarnation. Thicket-wet the jungle monad rivers one the neverone. The two are one are two are one. The Us.

Spiritmatter blends and joins in Alalia, the ocean of possibility that life drips eternally back into. Raindrops of animation, time hovers still as our lives touch and combine, souling creaturely the currents of becoming. The all is repeated and transformed, waves of knowing wyrded into the future, every act an act of fate. Odysseus journeys to Penelope again-and-again, eternal return mything every moment. The myth we carry together carries our carrying-together. Femmebutch, butchfemme. Freckles are indents in time, sun-kissing your Uniquing. My dimples are my gift to you. Placetime rhythms the echoing Unique, the breathing-heartbeat of intertwined anima. I love it when you give me flowers. I love it when you you. I love you.

My forever.

Sweet mother, I cannot weave –
Aphrodite has overcome me
with longing for a girl. – Sappho, Fragments

Image: Bouquet of Sunflowers by Claude Monet (1880)

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Note: this was written prior to Biden dropping.

There is only one significant political question: which side are you on?

Trump and Biden are made-up. Trump parasites the rage of white dispossession, a time worm rotting in the head cavity of America. A soulless hydra, Trump is puppeted by a new ruling class, the credit class, the virtual expression of rentier capital, capital loosed from property. In response, Biden limps along, the walking corpse of managerial capitalism. The Democratic Party is a worthless organ of professional politicos, a bureaucrat class intoxicated on the game of social organization. The managers took over in the wake of WW2, the duopoly of competing capitals vampirically absorbing the machinery of fascism, responding to colonialism’s necrosis in the heart of Empire with the neo-colonial apparatus of debt. Released from a commodity medium in the abolition of the gold standard, capital re-realizes itself in floating accumulation, power’s ghosting of material violence in immaterial discipline. Starvation is naturalized.

What Trump and Biden enflesh is the breaking-apart of the End of History, the unipolar world of American capital. Liberal democracy can no longer accumulate fast enough; the Time-Machine needs fuel, hurling itself off the cliff of constant capital. Variable capital in the core disappears and its function is re-routed through the colonies, bubbling up a multipolar world of patchwork capitals competing for virtuality. Sensing the decay of the old order, the patchwork terrorizes the earth, laying claim to a dying regime, to the accumulation of material power in constant capital and the simulacric absorption of attention in variable capital. The managerial class shifts-about to avoid Trump, but he roars into history, the horrorchild of multipolar nationalism and the capital tetris of the American Empire. American Capital separates itself from the liberal order and lays claim to its imperial mission – to use the reawakening body of fascism to fashion a new history, a new sequence of accumulation, multipolar war machines vying for the last scraps of variable capital as constant capital eclipses labor-power. The surplus is now the whole; the president is a warlord.

Trump is a performer, not an idiot. He toetaps the late stage republic, the mirage of democratic participation fading into the monarchic terror of reaction, MAGA Bonaparting the new elite into power. Reagan was the farce of America’s tragedy, Trump its tragicomedy. The Founding Fathers cloak themselves in Greco-Roman splendor, slave traders occupying the constant capital of land, the degenerated virus of Rome spreading across Turtle Island. Reagan re-thumps the heart of America through the phantasm of the cowboy, an occupier occupying an occupied role, suturing capital to the myth of its past, the lebensraum of the frontier. Trump is the summation of both, a celebrity Caesar, the hollow, paper-thin self-story of American capital, necrotic imperial violence smiling underneath the spectacle of wealth worship, the Prosperity Gospel materialized in the state. Trump is a Sears catalogue Hammurabi, law as something to be bought and sold, the state re-entering the circulation of capital as privatized injustice.

Patriotism is gang loyalty. Violence is leveled against the homo sacer, the non-citizen, whether migrant, criminal, foreigner, or terrorist. The old regime obscured war by naming it a police action; in the new order, the multipolar cartels un-name their victims and wield genocide by naming it as self-defense. The homo sacer are those who the gang does not offer protection, or for whom that protection has been revoked. Citizenship is contingent on loyalty, and it is citizenship that determines whether one is mourned. Lives lost become numbers passively referenced on the New York Times front page, a barely-whispered acknowledgment of the terror at the heart of capital. Gaza is the blueprint for the communities of the homo sacer, for any colony internal or external that seeks to break away. Capital builds concentration camps that cover entire cities, entire nations, while un-naming them – detention centers, migrant processing camps, occupied territories, prisons, institutions, ghettos, reservations, and black sites interlinked across the world. In this present-future, the land of the free expands to the whole of capital, freedom being not- homo sacer. To be free is to be worthy of mourning.

Gang politics requires gang politics. Schmitt understood that politics is rooted in us vs. them, friend and enemy; however, he mythed friend and enemy by localizing them in blood and territory, by sewing them to the state and a fascist worldview. Friendship, however, is alliance, and alliance births community. In the class struggle, the enemy is capital itself, the force of accumulation that terrorizes being. Life is our friend, the joy of being-together, of Uniques unfolding in the Gemeinwesen, the community-of-communities. The ruling class, cycling through its many forms, each a historical simulacrum obscuring capital, allies itself with the death machine, populating Tartarus with devils. But even here they are turning-against their essence, the common-being that thumps restless in the heart of humanity. Homo sapiens revolt against death in expanding the us to all, realizing liberation in allying across lines of struggle, a decentered network of resistance against Leviathan. Pan emerges from the mass strike and the black bloc, from Uniques working together to defeat Moloch, to re-enchant the world through abolishing capital, through friendship.

The enemy of accumulation is all held in common; the enemy of capital is the community-of-communities.

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. – Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Image: Message from a Desert Star by Mark Tobey (1972)

…I and you in the gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must not all of us have been here before? –And return and run in that other lane, outward, before us, in this long, eerie lane – must we not return eternally? – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

For MK.

*s(u)wen-, *sunno, sunne, sonne, sun – that which lights everything, that which shines, that which sustains, the cosmic feminine.

The sun has always been feminine. In the shade of the ash trees, the people of the garden reflect on the shadows as emanations of starlight, the love of the sunne. The frogs bribbit good morning in the helicopter ponds, echoing time through vine and bark, Embla and Askr emerging wyrd from the before. The sun comforts and welcomes the earth-souls into the pining present.

There is no measure. All there is is incommensurate quality, being in its hereness. No one is anyone else, no doing is another. I breathe, you breathe, we kiss, we kiss. Each moment is the emerging of a world from the is. Each is incomparable – again and again and again, waking up next to you is falling in love for the first time. Time. Time appears in the dance of being-together: “being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.” (Borges) I am here-, now-, with-you. The now-and-then is the choreography of presence, the holy longing of togethering. Every presence is anew a future-appearing, utopia-becoming. The present is the present of presence.

Measurement obscures time. This-and-that becomes this-or-that; the here becomes a 1, a 2, a 3… Quality is sliced into quantity, the sublimity of being catalogued, the wholeness of time split-apart. There is no presence in quantity, only absence. The quantity of a thing is the absence of what it is not – being is occluded in the nothing, the cave. Shadows take the place of forms and the people of the garden forget that it is the sunshine that makes the shadows dance. Anamnesis is remembering the sunlight, that being-here is already holy, that we are presence, not absence. Measure makes us forget the gift of the present, suspended anxiously between past and future… But the sun is always shining.

Measure creates self-denial, self-negation. It crystallizes pain through marking our being as that which we have lost, or that which are not. But there is nothing in us which is not, which is absence. You are you are you are. Here here here. Now now now. We are histories ever-present in every moment, whole worlds walking whole worlds. You are my world and I am yours. We are worlds making worlds, you and I. You and I. You and I. You and I. The holiness of You is immeasurable, incomparable, infinite – you-as-you-as-you. You-as-you-are, you-as-you-were, you-as-you-will-be. You.

Nietzsche invites us into the eternal return, the affirming of every moment as a moment we live infinitely, happily, excitedly, over-and-over-and-over-again. The eternal return escapes from measure, from quantity, through making every moment, every doing, every being, every life, eternal. The eternal gifts to us the present again. The present is You. We are presents, gifts, Christmases of loving-becoming, the infinitely valuable gift of Us. We present the present of our present presence and unfold together as blankets of starlight, every point a wold, every moment a universe. Even if all I had was one moment with you, I would have everything. Every moment with you is a moment I would return to again eternally. Again and again and again, just to be-with-you, to be-with-Katie. I refuse Nirvana to reincarnate again with you, to experience with you again. I will traverse samsara just to hold your hand again.

The sun has always been feminine. In the shade of the past, I warm myself in your light, every moment a timeless now in your presence. Leaving the cave, I kick away the ladder and feel the heat of love freckle my arms, future worlds dotting my skin like constellations. The grasshoppers sing recognition in the morninglight as joy dews like sweat on our lips. Embla and Askr, earth-souls wyrded by the gods, we soul-onward into eternal return, the ship of being arriving again-and-again. There is no part of you, no moment with you, that I would not return to – because I return, I return, I return to you. I wyrd the mystery of existence with you, two autos in allos, a together togethering a home. Summer breathes the infinite together; the sun holies my heart. You are my sunshine.

I love you.

Every situation, every moment — is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity. – Johann Goethe, quoted in Conversations with Goethe by Johann Eckermann

Image: In Bed, the Kiss by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1892)

The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.
- William Wordsworth, The Simplon Pass

ἀποκάλυψις – ἀπό-καλύπτω – apó-kalúptō – apokálupsis – apocalypse – un-cover, un-veil, un-conceal, reveal

I gift to you the unveiling; you gift to me the apocalypse.

Nine days from heaven, nine days to hell. The earth reveals the concealed, above and below. We animas in animation ballet the possible, hylomorphs of spiritmatter dueting the cosmos. I flower in time, the bloom of the here-and-now. Sunflowers mystic the senses, the what-is unveiling beauty. Every moment is an apocalypse and every motion a rebirth. Creation creates creation.

Thinking is a doing. Cartesian gnosticism haunts the bodymind. There is no form outside the forming and enformed, no world other than the one of spiritflesh. We talk the same world that we think and think the same matter in our listening. Walking. Kneeling. Rocking back-and-forth. Consciousness bubbles up from bodies-in-placetime, the circulation of attention in kenosis. The self is gift and given, same-as-love. How many Seraphim can nap together on a couch? Perichoresis charts the ineffability of the is; love animates the imago Dei. Jesus weeps and thinks that makes him special. We weep and pretend that we don’t. Humanimals mundane the special. Animanimals special the mundane. We never left the Garden but forgot that it was growing. To understand is to apocalypse, to reveal the already-here. To apocalypse the all, one spirits the cosmopsyche, unraveling the universe in particularity, the eternal super-kenosis. Sophia is as Pan does.

We forest us forests. Every life is a biome, the ecosystem of my body, the placetime of my mind. There are no properties in the thing; the properties emerge from relation. Each bundle of spiritmatter potentiates powers that enform the faculties of other powers, the lifepower of subjectivity. This enforming actualizes a potential, manifesting a property as a relation between you and I. No leaf is green, but I and the leaf together qualia greenness. There is neither subject nor object, only world. Consciousness is the world-in-animation, the flow of actualizing potential that is spiritmatter. To perceive is to apocalypse, to reveal the potential, to make-new the world. God Gods as I I.

You gift to the One, Many; I gift to the Many, One.

γένεσις – γίγνομαι–σις – gígnomai-sis – génesis – genesis – origin, source, to-come-into-being, to-become

What one needs to do at every moment of one’s life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world. – Nikolai Berdyaev, The Beginning & the End

Image: Genesis by Alexander Bogen (2002)