Fish In the Afternoon

“There is one story left, one road: that it is. And on this road there are very many signs that, being, is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete.”

Parmenides, Fragment B 8.1-4

1. There is One.

2. The One is Unique – itself-in-itself and irreplaceable with any other.

3. The One is all, everything-together.

4. Everything constitutes everything-together.

5. Everything is Unique in the One – itself-in-itself and irreplaceable.

6. There are Many that are One.

7. The Many are each One and constitute the One.

8. You are One – the Unique, yourself-in-yourself and irreplaceable.

9. You are Many – both part of everything-together constituting the One and One that is everything-together constituted by the Many.

10. You are the One and the Many.

“Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.”

Heraclitus, Fragments

Image: One and Three Shovels, Joseph Kosuth (1965)

Zzzzz-t, zzzzz-t, zzzzz-t

Mosquito

Spirit is moisture.

Condense and evaporate, flux-pond motioning in formless apeiron. Swampy matter sparses and denses into life, human-soul animal-ghost. Drink from this bread and eat from this wine, mosquito seraphim bzzing holy holy holy; fire-alight in alligator-tongue-melody, reptile-psalms in excelsis deo.

Time dollops space like the hills and hollers of an unfolded quilt, ensouled fabric emanating spiritmatter as bodied story and storied body. Manna-breath piles solid atop fishscale Zeno, rolling across the grass lover-in-lover, the tortoise and the hare.

We are the are, we speak the have-been, we do the to-be. Haunting being, hazy becoming, the mo(u)rning of memoryless time.

Veil over veil, O the Omega. Sparrow crying tearless in lost and empty Ozarkia.

Cooooo-cooooo-cooooo

Dove

Image: Forest Swamp, Arkhyp Kuindzhi (c. 1908)

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Being or becoming animal; having-been, to-be, growling out feral subjectivity. I am an organism, walking-grasping, shaking boots into lizard echoes of desert ferocity. Awoo! Howl down the hallows, human glares menacing from the lightpost – cop walk, pig badge, animal control. Tzzt zap, electric baton, psychiatric wristbands wrap parched over beastflesh.

Alalia (tsk tsk) against-this, creature-then. To-groan (roar) gasp-ecstatic. Elder trees say hello to comrade salamander, bark-voices barking voiceless, shout shout howl into green-tint starlight. Shhh the northlight sleeps.

We crawl (we gallop) over gravel into open fields, tongue-melody in moonlight. We fuck cosmogonies, ohing fingerwork into possibilia. Propel, timeless, the spiral of creation. Hairy palms trace animism into non-spoken thought (who-who who-who). Rocks chatter mystery to the air.

A creature ahs, awe the sublime. Mountains over mountains, peeking over peaks. Ghosts speak sharply the formless one. (hhh)

A claw right into Parmenides, the poet transforms. Lycanthropy in memetic motion. From words on into not, a gapless gap. The nothing everythings.

Animal.

“I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”

Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

Image: Clown, Horse, Salamandra, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1912)

“…we must declare that this Cosmos has verily come into existence as a Living Creature endowed with soul and reason… a Living Creature, one and visible, containing within itself all the living creatures which are by nature akin to itself.”

Plato, Timaeus, 30b-d

What is form? Is the form that which forms or that which is formed? 

Form both forms and is formed. Split between these two processes, the circuit of formation assembles the form, an ellipsis between actor and acted-upon, subject and object. Ghosts congregate along the edges of electron clouds, probability staticking the air with possibility, fizzy being as poppy modality. Does a form reside anywhere? Is a form here or there, now or then? Can we touch them, hear them, see them? Can we transform them, create them, destroy them? Can we storm the palace walls?

For Plato, the forms are out-there, transcendent, beyond, the world as the sculptor’s imagination, the dreamscape of categories shadowing over the land. The Demiurge architects nature from the forms, the floorplan of the good and beautiful, pathways within and between the geometry of the One groaning into imaginary labyrinths. All emanates from the forms, becoming immanent through the work of the Demiurge, the first-labor that materializes the immaterial.

But are these forms really material? What does a form taste like? What does it smell like? Can I run into one and be bounced back? Does it wobble? Does it stim? Does it have flesh and breath, heartbeat and sweat, song and thought? Are these forms us or are they not-us, out-there or within?

Turning Plato upside down, the Demiurge appears as a gateway, the abstraction of concrete form into Idea. No longer out-there, the forms are realized in all things, animation as perpetual architecting, the groove of matter discoing into the multiplicity of life. You and I and we and us and this and that and here and there and now and then as formed and forming, forests growing atop abandoned caves. The Demiurge is a myth, burning down the dance club and reciting sickly sweet poetry on its ashes, gumming difference into chewable sameness. The Demiurge appears whenever we imagine ourselves as gods, whenever we pass through Hades and forget our mortality, forms becoming separate from us rather than something we inhabit, something to glimpse but never touch, to speak of but never kiss, to recite but never love. Flat words on a page imagined to be the tangible curves they represent.

To inhabit the forms we must re-member. Returning to our formed and forming nature, we recognize what we have formed and what has formed us, nature emanating through us rather than from us. Saunterers by heart, we homo sapiens walk through a world of multiplicity and echopraxy, but as the garbage heap of our architected ideas obscure our paths we forget the forest and see only a paved road. We mistake the real for simulacra and simulacra for the real, nature becoming something to be acted-upon rather than that which acts, while our idols – capital, law, nation, race, patriarchy – become something solid beneath us, an unalterable earth. Nature ceases to be as Leviathan devours being, the nothing expanding as it consumes the cosmos. We imagine ourselves as lords over nature while our images have become lords over us, demonic machinery as a Demiurge of fire, the Moloch of ontological arson.

Rebellion means smashing the forms that we have created, killing the Demiurge within to join with all as formed and forming. Through rendering our icons to dust, becoming traitors to the abstract, we resist the power which emanates from us but which has become separate from us, the ghost of human self-idolatry. Destroying the forms, we enter the space of formlessness to re-assemble ourselves as formed and forming, insurrection becoming creativity, anarchy becoming community, and Leviathan becoming Pan. A riot of the soul.

“O evanescent temples built of man
To deities he honoured and dethroned!
Earth shoots a trail of her eternal vine
To crown the head that men have ceased to honour.
Beneath the coronal of leaf and lichen
The mocking smile upon the lips derides
Pan’s lost dominion; but the pointed ears
Are keen and prick’d with old remember’d sounds.
All my breast aches with longing for the past!
Thou God of stone, I have a craving in me
For knowledge of thee as thou wert in old
Enchanted twilights in Arcadia.”

Eleanor Farjeon, “Pan-Worship”

Image: Creation of the World III, Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1906)

“There is no small pleasure in sweet water.”

Ovid, Letters from the Black Sea

I went to the ocean recently.

Ocean currents are an emergent phenomenon. From the interaction of wind, heat, salt, and a complex system of internal flows and breaks, the whole of the sea moves and rocks – back-and-forth, back-and-forth. This movement is perceived whenever we enter the ocean, whenever we feel its rolling and dancing, whenever the waves push us down or propel us forward, whenever we are lifted upwards or feel the water crash above us. But it is not just the ocean that is moving – it is everything. The sand on the beach is formed from the slow movement of matter in touch and tension with the ocean. Our bodies are communities of microorganisms, perpetually flowing through us like an organic architecture, forming tiny ecosystems populated with animated, living creatures going about their own lifeways. All of the world is motion and flow, the stimming of the cosmos in perpetual becoming. Nature itself is a stim. 

Sex is also a stim. Or, more accurately, a collection or choreography of stims, an art of stimming. In sex, our bodyminds act as the subject and object of a dance of intensities, of attention, intention, and sensation. By intensity, I mean that these modes of action and perception are not measured quantitatively, through differences in magnitude, but qualitatively, through differences in kind. Each sensation, directed and focused through the interplay of attention and intention, is incommensurate, forming an experience that is particular to the bodies of lovers. Sex inheres in the imagination, the play between these modes forming a world which lovers inhabit, each becoming a landscape, a geography, a place of dwelling, fingertips brushing over mountains and lips tasting rivers, salinity dripping from the tongue.

I have auditory-tactile synesthesia. This means that the sense modalities of sound and touch intertwine in my experience, noise as tactile awareness, sonic atmosphere as patterns on and beneath the skin. My sense-world is only minimally visual, instead being oriented towards this interrelation between the auditory and tactile, objects coming into and out of awareness based on their sonic qualities and the way that these qualities vibrate across my body. I therefore also experience sex differently, as sex is intimately tied to the senses and the way these senses interrelate. Sex is composed of stims that echo through our perception. Moans and sighs are an echolalic call and response, an improvisational melodic riff atop the polyrhythms of enfleshed movement, tactility echoing into auditory bliss. The spiraling of fingertips and rhythm of hips are waves of rolling and rocking motion, skin against skin as hand against drum, tongue against tongue as wind against the earth. For me, sex always moves in and around and within the echolalic, the transformative interplay of breath and sound in attentive pleasure. Thigh against thigh as vibrations against matter. Tap tk-tk tap-tap. 

Our vision of Eros is too constrained by the Platonic image. For Plato, erotic desire invites us to contemplate the forms, the yearning for the body being sublimated into recognition of the abstract essence of beauty as a reflection of the good. However, this is the opposite direction to Eros. Though for Plato sensual desire moves us from the concrete particular to the abstract universal, revealing the transcendent value of the latter, Eros moves us from the abstract universal to the concrete particular, revealing the latter’s immanent worth. The power of the erotic is in forgetting the forms and instead making a world – a real, breathing, sighing, and sweating world – with another, an embodied, concrete other, an other of flesh and being whose pleasure is not a shadow of another world but the good’s presence in ours.

Eros is always dependent on the particularities of our bodymind. Sex is grounded in the fleshiness of being, the multi-sensate world of bodies-in-motion. Each person is an ocean, a collection of internal and external dynamics that form an ever-flowing melody, a system of harmonic changes that transform one’s relationship to oneself, to others, and the world. To taste another is to enter an infinite space delicately folded into finitude, teeth brushing up against universes, fractals of possibility quivering through orgasm. To form a world with another through sexual play is to step foot into the unfathomable and feel the warm salt of their life intermixing with yours. Heat with heat, wind with wind, flow with flow, sound with sound, sense with sense, world with world. 

The waves in you meeting the waves in me.

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand

Image: Feminine Wave, Katsuhika Hokusai (1845)