“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)
Fish In the Afternoon 