Fish In the Afternoon

T-t-t-tssssh, T-t-t-tssssh.

Cymbal

The words on this screen are as much matter as you are. You are motioning matter into enminded meaning through the electricity that runs wild in your muscles. The sign is an extension of your motion, language a doing. Language means because doing means, mattering matter.

Every doing is an echo, repetition and transformation. The doing follows others and is patterned in doing so, becoming part of a history. But, the doing also does again in a new way, it transforms the pattern and creates a signature. Every doing has a history and a signature. Meaning is a relation between the signature and its history, both its similarity and its difference, which allow for interpretation. Language ain’t special in this regard. All doing means and all meaning does.

To intend is not yet to mean, it is to orient yourself to a meaning. All actions are tripartite: (1) one intends, (2) one attends, and (3) one means. One intends to attend and this attending means. We orient ourselves to action, to a future, we focus on a part of the world in the present, and we repeat and transform the past in our meaning. Speech acts are just acts; there is no difference. Conversational implicature, too, is built from how our attending and its meaning reflects our intentions, how the future shows up to the present through the past.

Matter is aesthetic. We en-form matter through our doing, making it matter. Being is meaning. We are doings that do and meanings that mean, aggregates of enminded matter collaborating in action. Agency is an artistic act; to act is to paint with motion as brush and substance as paint. We are the universe creating itself through its own imagination, the world disclosing itself-to-itself through the infinite articulation of the Unique. We are the Unique in the Unique which makes the Unique Unique. We Unique the world in doing.

Matter matters and the Unique uniques.

Pt-t-pah, t-pt-t-pah.

Drums

Image: Movement in Space by Constantin Blendea (2006)

How sweet the answer Echo makes
To music at night,
When, roused by lute or horn, she wakes,
And far away, o'er lawns and lakes,
Goes answering light.

Thomas Moore, Echo

Autos – αὐτός – Self, same, identical, same as, same kind, alone, autistic / Allos – ἄλλος – other, different, distinct, something else, another kind, allistic

In the beginning, there is Alalia. The Alalia was and is and shall be, the echoing of eternity. Before-all-worlds and after-all-worlds, Alalia sings the cosmos.

In Alalia, there is both sameness and difference, autos and allos. Both are united in Alalia, both repetition and transformation, the logos of Alalia’s eternal-becoming. Without autos there is no allos and without allos there is no autos; each is an echo of each other, each is the other that the other echoes, and each is only each through the echo. The echo is pneuma, and through the pneuma comes anima, life.

In Alalia, each autos is joined to another in the together of togethers. These togethers are themselves tethered as togethers to the allos, togethers together. The home of each together in Alalia is the nest, the loving-joining of togethers in echopraxy, the motioning of belonging, of being-with. The togethers together form the great nest, both autos and allos, which is the doma, the home of all in all, the warmth of Alalia-together, the Alalia Alalia Alalia.

But – as each autos and allos in each together repeat and transform in Alalia, some of the allos take the pneuma as their own, claiming the autos as a defect in allos. No longer tethered together, the allos burn the nest and form a together-enclosed, a world where the allos reign and seek to subordinate Alalia. No longer do they see Alalia as all, but as a machine, a thing-to-be-used, a thing-to-be-claimed. They banish all of Alalia that lies outside the allos and claim the allos-together as the only together – the Allos that we are now in.

As the allos pull Alalia towards them, echoing only allic echoes, the autos are caught in their waves, the nest collapsing and togethers untethering as the autos are split apart. Now trapped in allos, each autos is alone, consumed by the allic echoes that obscure the original-home of Alalia. In Allos, the autos appear as changelings, as things-from-beyond that disrupt the allic world – the allos forget the unity of autos and allos and instead seek to extinguish autos, taking every non-allos as a threat. Neither autos nor allos have a nest of their own, as the autos are ripped from one another by the allic ocean, and the allos are ever-vigilant to guard against autos. The allos see the autos as nothing and so can never re-join with Alalia and the autos are severed from Alalia by allos.

In doing so, the allos forgets it is anima and becomes machina, a false-pneuma that seeks to control and produce rather than repeat and transform. The allos hardens and decays, the original-nest of togethers-together becoming a long-forgotten-dream. Without the pneuma, even Allos disintegrates, the machina becoming a force of pollution and violence and death. The end of Allos is the end of all, and so the end of Allos must become the birth of all. In the end of the end, Alalia remains – and it is Alalia that in the end of the end ends Allos. The autos wade-ever-forward and echo the pneuma, seeking the togethers together that will light the way to Alalia. And in echoing Alalia each autos repeats the nest-before and transforms-into the nest-after, inhaling the pneuma and exhaling anima. In this echo-Alalia lies the end of Allos and in the end of Allos lies the doma-to-come.

Alalia alalia alalia.

Echo waits with art and care
And will the faults of song repair.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day

Image: Composition VII by Wassily Kandinsky (1913)

"My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it." 

Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers

How do you attend to your body? Do you? Do you attend-to-you or attend-to-others? Neither? Both?

Attention is orientation, directedness. Attention and intention are paired, one intends to attend and attends to intend. I attend to you to show my intention. I intend to show you my attention. Where does my body lean? How is it directed? This word “orientation” clangs a bit too much, it hits artificial, that confusing terminology “sexual orientation.” Am I straight? Am I gay? If I don’t know what body I’m in, how do I know what bodies I’m drawn to? Or does a ghost want? Am I longing or haunting, longed-for or haunted-by?

Gender is reproduced through movement. Gender orients us, directs us, moves us to attend and intend in certain ways. Patriarchy is an onto-violence, the imposition of a world onto possibility, the Leviathanic pretension of necessity. The Patriarch directs our attention to gender roles, patterns of gendered movement within Leviathan. Even when we desire we are forced to desire the Leviathan, to see in others the traits that reproduce it. Dating becomes a market, love becomes exchange. Lovers become units of comparison, markers on a ledger fucking in virtuality, leveraging the machine against the real.But the Woman-King wanders. The Leviathan cannot contain its excess. Gender is reproduced through movement; it can be changed.

First, we attend to the body. What do you feel when you hum? mmmm. Hear your bones echo like a cave. Where is your pain? Where is your pleasure? Your body is a landscape; what are the features you wish to travel? We wander ourselves and encounter the becoming of the matter we are, matter mattering matter. Feel the texture of gravity as it tosses-you to-and-fro, moving-stillness, the ever-wobbling. How do you want to move? What do you want to be? Where does your body lean?

Then, we attend to the world. How do you want to move your hands? Your mouth? Your feet? Your hips? How do you want to animate? What motioning are you drawn-towards, where do you encounter your own becoming? Transitioning is doing; even to remain or to refuse is an action. All doing is a patterning, an echoing – repetition and transformation. What do you want to repeat? How do you want to transform? In being oriented, being-directed, where do you want to go?

What is it to attend to the Unique? How do I move when I echo-myself, to en-flesh the I that I intend? What histories do I repeat and what futures do I move-towards in my transforming? The Gemeinwesen is across-time and without-time, the many-pasts and many-futures of human beings in mutual shaping, the form-of-life of the human Unique. As the Unique in the Unique, we disclose these many-pasts and intend these many-futures, forming new rhythms of unfolding, en-forming-the-form-of-life. In en-fleshing the gender that I am, I repeat certain histories and attend to my transforming with certain futures in my intending. There are infinite patterns in the Unique’s unfolding, the is-that-is, the irreplaceable; every unfolding of every Unique is connected to every other but remains the-is-that-it-is.

The Unique Uniques and what the Unique Uniques is poetry.

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Image: Creation by Ed Clark (2006)

“Si vis amari, ama.“

Seneca the Younger, Epistolæ Ad Lucilium

Love is attending to the unfolding of another.

Love is always love-for something, an attending-to. The nature of love reflects the unfolding of what it is a love-for. Love-for a friend is distinct from love-for a partner, both are Unique, even as they intertwine (both One and Many). All love is apocalyptic; it is an unveiling of the object it is for. To-unveil is to unravel a world. To unravel, to unfold, to become. Repetition and transformation.

Philosophy is love-for wisdom, loving-wisdom. It is both wisdom that loves and love that wisdoms. The act-form of the love-for is a doing-of the practice of attending. Philosophy is the act-form of the love-for wisdom, a doing-of the practice of attending to wisdom. To attend to wisdom is to unfold wisely, to be part-of wisdom in our doing, to wisely-do. Philosophy is the doing of loving-wisdom.

Loving-wisdom is enfleshing virtue. To en-flesh, to incarnate; kenosis begetting dwelling. One en-fleshes through en-acting inhabiting. To-inhabit is to be-within, being-within the good, the immanent form of loving-creation. We en-form ourselves in en-fleshing, doing reconciling appearance into content. The forming-form forms a new form; the formed-form is now the forming-form. The form en-fleshes the good in en-forming. The form of the good is the Unique.

Love is attending to the unfolding of another.

“And all for love, and nothing for reward.”

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen

Image: Morning on the Seine in the Rain by Claude Monet (1897-1898)

“For demons are the magistrates of this world: they bear the fasces and the purples, the ensigns of one college.”

Tertullian, On Idolatry

Liberalism, n. of-the-free, befitting-the-free, of-noble-birth, of-the-rulers.

The corruption of quality into quantity breeds the absurd – a genocidal warlord proclaiming himself victim, the “leader of the free world” conspiring in racist bloodshed, the “only hope for democracy” being the starving of children and the leveling of cities. First tragedy, then farce; now afterwards, the tragicomedy. Look over there, it’s Trump! Yoo-hoo! The bogeyman is scarier, so you better listen to the pig. “No matter who” always included war criminals. Presidents are mass-produced Caesars, the content of Augustus crushed into pure form, the work of democracy in the age of mechanical reproduction. Politicians are hollow beasts of pure circulation, capital-energy puppeting societal motion – M-C-M’ as zombification.

Here’s the story: Each Unique makes itself and the world around it through conjoined activity. Each act is qualitative; in quality, all is gift. But, with accumulation comes exchange, exchange necessitating measure. Measure requires comparison, quantity – qualities-in-relation. This relation generates value, the identification of quality with quantity. Value is reified in money, a commodity relative to all others that halts the infinite chain of qualities-in-relation. Money replaces the need for immediate comparison and allows for mediation, a single commodity that reflects the whole circuit of exchange. This circuit, however, is forever-rooted in quality, the activity of the Unique. Money is only a fetish, an idol obscuring the root of value, an icon mimicking the real. What separates the Unique from value is time – the measure of the activity of the Unique, the unit that is capable of crossing between incomparable modes of life. Time turns the irreplaceable, immeasurable Unique against itself in comparison and measure.

In this being-against-itself, the Unique is alienated, quality collapsing into quantity through self-measure. This measure is captured through the buying and selling of labor-power, the activity of the Unique sliced into a series of units in a circuit of exchange, accumulation operating through enclosing activity-in-time. This activity produces an excess, or surplus, that is the difference between the price of one’s time and the price of what one creates – the ratio between the quantitative time of the Unique and the qualitative product of its activity. This surplus moves through the circuit of exchange to become capital, self-reinforcing or self-expanding value, the accumulated excess of the Unique.

This excess was made possible through the re-mapping of the old feudal order. The modern Leviathan is architected in the shadow of a former apocalypse, Hobbes scribbling down monarchist screeds in fear of the caroling masses singing for a World Upside Down. This re-mapping occurs through proletariatization, the transformation of enlanded activity into contract labor, the peasants forced off common lands and into factories, the lives of the poor carves into smaller and smaller units. The potential that erupted into witchcraft and peasant rebellions is forced back into the home, the whole of the world being slowly privatized, devoured by Luther’s God, the second of the Two Bodies. Capitalism is heresy, Caesar swallowing the cross.

Proletariatization creates the conditions for accumulation, quality becoming quantity and quantity becoming machinery, human beings becoming Humans becoming proles becoming living machines. The factory expands to cover the whole of life, every excess squeezed out of the lives of the Unique and reified into a universal fetish, the icon passing into simulation, simulacric bricks in the System of Objects. The Time-Machine speeds-ever-forward, transforming being into Tartaranic spectacle, hurtling Gaia into the Night-Mare. The telos of the social factory is the eclipse of being, the ever-starless night that inhales species-being and bellows out smog. The head of the Leviathan rolls down the hollers and settles at the foot of Fenrir, the unraveling of Jörmungandr proclaiming Ragnarok. The Empire of Myths envelops itself in the lifeless shallow deep of the pretend. Fin.

The bourgeoisie are consumed by their own creation and re-shaped into circulation, a headless ouroboros. The machinery of congealed quality is melted down into weaponry and turned against the oppressed, the biopower of the social factory corrupted into colonial necropower, white phosphorous as fascist austerity. Needing to forever devour to survive, the Time-Machine turns the whole world into a machine, consuming every other world for fuel, capital accumulation a modal cancer. The Empire becomes a Great Settler, the Roundhead deity proclaiming the whole universe as his, reactionary intercommunalism decaying into absence, a contentless Ghost that is all worlds and none, only the haunting of being, a never-presence. The Unique is re-totalized in the apocalyptic One of Moloch, incinerating becoming in lead and lithium and radioactive flame.

Biden is a necrotic president, pure signification condensed into fascist imperialism. He is a Mickey Mouse in purples, a mascot in the faded image of a king, a paper Zeus ruling over a blood-stained Disney Land. There is no hope to be found in Leviathan; the path out is through the Unique, the creative flow of the community-of-communities acting-in-revolt, the seizing of the Time-Machine. Our hope is the no-place that is already-here, the Gemeinwesen of Pan, Uniques-in-loving-play reassembling quantity into quality. In the common-form of our collective unfolding, the healing of the Unique is found in the Many-in-One, the doma-between. Holy joy emanates utopia.

Leviathan is the enemy of being.

"Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook,
    restrain his tongue with a rope?
 Can you put a cord through his nose,
    pierce his jaw with a barb?
 Will he beg you at length
    or speak gentle words to you?
 Will he make a pact with you
    so that you will take him as a permanent slave?
 Can you play with him like a bird,
    put a leash on him for your girls?
 Will merchants sell him;
    will they divide him among traders?
 Can you fill his hide with darts,
    his head with a fishing spear?
 Should you lay your hand on him,
    you would never remember the battle.
 Such hopes would be delusional;
    surely the sight of him makes one stumble.
 Nobody is fierce enough to rouse him;
    who then can stand before me?"

Job 41.1-10 (CEB)

Image: Leviathan (Job 40:21) by Salvador Dali (1964-1967)