Fish In the Afternoon

“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)

“Only an atheist can be a good Christian.”

Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity

To be read aloud, if possible.

Alien mother the not-here stainglass / frame / the invisible.

Silence. Hereafter we-ghost. Stark pony the-eversalt-ocean fibers glass the Renaissance. Paleaether, heretongue the gargoyle, medieval monks that practice Thomas pebble manuscripts that glory glory. The time-machine thrsts acting everever the concrete tumbles poltergeist. Work to live to never-play. A meta-modern history, the proletariat.

Queer haunts hearthhh kin-chitterchatter the impossible anarchy. Esse esse esse we ain’t. Speaks clearly the hillbilly.

Banjo woods groove echo the neverthought. We fight we-fear. Do you even believe this is language? Allic monstrosity, the Leviathan, the Demiurge that architects Tartarus from the machine. Value is an expression of time. Time is quantity. Quantity is measure. Measure is the hole at the heart of value. From measure on-into the virtual, the Tartaranic behemoth that guards the abyss.

Noise.

Hear s-eak. Echo softly the ever-arch.

Gallops-in, heraldic Pan to avenge our Gaiac origin. A time-stop, the mass strike – rioting-against-the-abstract. The cave is long-vacant, a Coca-Cola themepark; the bourgeoisie enveloped by the force-underneath, the serpent of measure, capital. Capital is sentient. An alien-mother built-by-us, speeding-eternally the night-mare. Black bloc tactics thunder Panic, the Unique annihilating measure.

Everyone and everything is Unique.

“This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”

André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto

Image: Disks Bearing Spirals by Marcel Duchamp (1923)

“Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.”

Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm

Content note: Discussion of transphobia and genocide. Queerphobic slurs.

For Harriett.

φ1 – Language is alienated music.

φ2 – What is a world? An old carpenter; Demiurge dusted with ruddy-rusted earth, forming forms out of the desertdirt. {weeping, waiting, weeping, world}. A quilt spread out over not. Signing-signifying-spiritmatter threaded delicately into spacetime; being-in-the-world as being-in-meaning. Resonance as ontopresence; the is is. (Corded knots tied over illegible maps, the what-is-to-be, élan vital as topology.) Nothing emanating everything.

φ3 – The world is a beforelanguage – signification without signifiers, silence as sound. The bonobos sang before they spoke, homotongue riffing ontoallegra. Between tasteflesh of passionfruit, apelungs echo out lifeworlds and evolve through melody, genetic sequences plucked by ensouled soil. Humanity is a momentary pizzicato in Pan, the tk-tk-tk of heretime becoming-subject, objects in intertwined consciousness. (Anima in anxiously-attending animation). You-and-I as being.

φ4 – Yggdrasil is enminded, world-soul of signing-apes; earth-artist praying to the Garden. (Eat the fruit off your fingers, tongue raspberries into hereness). God is a ghost, sweatspirit of the whip trembling heavy over adamskin; liptouch sigh from barefoot Lazarus. “This is my body. Take, eat.” The essence of language – giving and receiving, top and bottom, signatures in erotic harmony. The beforesound bubbles from bodies-in-motion, atoms kissing breathlessly in the void. “The message of the flower is the flower.” (Scruton)

φ5 – Fagbodies fucking fagbodies (who will think of the gaze?). William Blake bleeds ellipsis into fullthroated guillotine: “Revolution! Revolution!” (Is there any change in a vacuum?) The end of history is an eternal moment, a timeless not. Hylomorphic whitenoise speaking spirit, chewing spit into calloused wounds. The market-Moloch of comparison grinds quality into quantity and essence into commodity. The whole of the world as a defiled temple. O Mary, my Mary – snakecrush in oiled heels proclaiming insurrection. Crucified joy.

φ6 – God is enmattered-trickery, restless transformation. A liquidbeing shapeshifting in fragile apeiron. Identity is an ever-refracting abyss, the “yes, there!” of the pointing-self, the quantity-line that holds between subject and object, intense-attention bearing toward. “Look! Look!” Yelps the estranged. I do not identify, I dwell. I am not, I only. Sweat is the prime substance; everything else is a mode of moisture, wet-affects signifying swamp. I am a dragonfly. “…you must pay attention to your nonsense.” (Wittgenstein) Nonsense is unraveled sense / Music is alienated breath.

φ7 – Gender is self-immolation. Dykeflesh of oak-cut Christ, chasing the simulators out of the sensed, cord-tear in simulacra. Breathing-in gasoline, pneumatic napalm architecting the not. Shimmertouch gap that floats burnt-words out into kaleidoscopic totality, the herebody gasping voiceless over the everarch. (Hearsay, shesay!). The painter breaks skin and rearranges impressions into matter, ontomythology condensing sense into extension. The body is a groove, swaying hips illocuting jazz into Quine-jungle nightclubs. “The message of the orgasm is the orgasm.” Transvestite cogito waving goodbye to melted wax.

φ8 – The if-then patterns history. Butch fingers glide pleasuretense into sing-song modality, existants throbbing existence in being-cum-melody. Look at-me / into-me – femme-gaze freeing subjectivity out of queerrot. Re-become, re-become; Sapphic incarnation. (Say “yes!” to women by saying “yes!” to the not-men. He-she alchemy groaning nihil). Take-into oneself the rage of the earthfuck – tranny womyn screaming the anti-I, chaosmosis struggling blood into inkblot. Dissubject collapsing dyskinesis into dysphoric dysmorphia (dissection – dissensus). Dissuade. Creative destruction flowing evernow the Unique.

φ9 – Earlier this year, someone told me they were going to shoot me and every other trans person for corrupting the youth. There was a mass shooting and we were the scapegoats; “groomers.” Afterwards, I started thinking about what my own death would be like. I took a walk to see my duckfriend, Harriett, and typed a pseudo-will on my phone: First things first — burn Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs. Do not read it. Cremate my body, ash to ash. Whatever’s cheapest and greenest. If it’s not too much hassle, scatter ash in the Ozark National Forest. Don’t hurt anything; the forest comes first. Scatter me wherever is best for plants and animals. Attend to them. Give my books to my friends; give everything else to my family. — gets nothing. Celebrate with a moonshine mass. Illegal; legal if you gotta. (J interjects: “It’s not moonshine if it’s legal. That’s just white whiskey.”). Smoke up. Be safe. Songs should come from the Little Red Songbook, the Carter family, the Free Will Baptist hymnal, Ozark folk songs, the Psalters, Hank Williams, and Willi Carlisle. Love everything forever. Be gay, do crime.

φ10 – If you meet Ashton on the road, kill him. If you meet ash, echo.

“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

Image: The Duck Pond, Pierre-Augustue Renoir (1873)

“Stone. A stone butch is a woman who doesn’t allow herself to be fucked.”

Regan McClure, “Stone Femme”

I am a mountain.

No one enters the mountain. But the mountain enters, the tectonic plates move.

When I was a kid, I wrote a story about a man disassembling a mountain. Unlike Sisyphus, the man must move the rocks down rather than up. Rock by rock he had to take apart this mountain until there was nothing left.

He hated the mountain. The mountain took up his whole life. There was nothing else to do but take apart the mountain. He just wanted the mountain to be gone. Please, anything but the mountain.

No one enters the mountain. But the mountain enters, the tectonic plates move.

I am a mountain.

ash/cygnus. She/zhe/they.

“I wondered how it would feel to be touched and not be afraid.”

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Image: Conversation with the Mountain by Shitao (1656-1707)