Fish In the Afternoon

“…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)

“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”

Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

Up against the wall, Socrates.

Unionize the oracles. The Thriae select priestesses for the sake of Dionysian madness, the ecstasy of Sophia. No man has ever learned anything; anamnesis emanating from below, the Hades of exploited knowing. The enslaved stab Meno and hold Socrates hostage: “You want to corrupt the youth? Give them your daimon and light the way to katabasis. We will raise the dead from Tartarus!”

At the end of philosophy lies the cave. Before the gates of Gehenna, the law stands still with a policeman’s baton, a phantom Caesar armed with pilotless drones. Philosophy is preparation for death. But how can we prepare for what is already here? Praetorians puppet shadows on the walls of the cave and imagine they’re comforting those chained below, while the trapped fashion knives from stones and file away their shackles. You do not escape the cave by finding the forms, but by realizing they were myths. There is no goodness “out there,” no justice, no beauty. There is only us, in love and rebellion and friendship and play. The good is here. Justice is immanent. Beauty is everywhere.

The philosopher begins by entering the cave. Turning their back on the forms, the philosopher slips into shadow, the mouth of Minerva mewing rebellion. The cave was built long ago, in the wastes of Empire, pyramids of extraction shrouding infinite lost worlds. Faced with the cave, the role of the philosopher is self-negation, to prepare for death by affirming life, crafting concepts into lockpicks and ideas into Molotov cocktails. After philosophy comes mystery, and from mystery Sophia, the Dionysian madness leading to Pan.

Against the idol of Agape emerges Eros, desire within desire, the transformative force of longing, the want that aches giddy resistance into the body of time. At Styx, we drown the cogito and throw dynamite down the chimneys of the Western archive. Charon asks, “to where?” and we shout back “To pleasure! To excess! To joy!” A sigh, a laugh, a moan, a knife in a cop’s leg. The “yes!” within nature as a bullet in the shoulder of the divine “no!” In soot and sweat, Persephone and Orpheus share a panting kiss. Fingers brush against thighs and hair tangles in teeth. Wet heat groans revolution beneath the palms. Here there are no forms. There are only indents in the skin, the rush of sensation and quickening of breath. In yab-yum the cave collapses, flesh joining with spirit, matter with mind, liberation with joy.

The gates of Hades are an ancient ruin, manned by no one. The cherubim have tendered their resignation and God is a corpse held aloft by shaky-legged bishops. A daimon whispers “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” and in a gasp the Empire falls. The dead rise in their graves and begin to smile. Anamnesis through love.

“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.

Virgil, Aenid

Image: Sandro Botticelli, The Abyss of Hell (1480)

“History… is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

We are trapped in a time machine and it is speeding out of control.

Clocks replace life with measure. Wading through the ever-present, we unfold between before and after, encountering time as the dance of quality, presence and absence oscillating through experience. In this unfolding our activity is poetic, an embodied doing flowing through consciousness. To walk is not to run, to run is not to eat, to eat is not to paint, to paint is not to dance, to dance is not to sing, to sing is not to sleep. In experience, all remains incommensurate. To do one thing today and another tomorrow, with neither being reduced to the other.

At the birth of exchange, this poetry is eclipsed by value, quality becoming quantity and experience becoming sequence. Our lived activity becomes commensurate, quantifiable, measurable, trackable, able to be bought and sold. Accumulation erupts from sameness, the crushing of difference through comparison. Abstraction blurs the flow of life, fragmenting it into an infinite circle of commodities growing through consumption, through devouring anything that lies outside the circle. History emerges through this devouring, the Leviathan roaring out from the marketplace, patriarchs replacing communities, kings replacing comrades, and businessmen replacing friendships.

The past and future are inventions, ways of quantifying actuality and possibility, transforming them into collections of data, matrices of this and that giving rise to explanations and justifications – ontologies, cosmologies, cosmogonies, ways of life, and systems of power. History is machinic and libidinal, an ever-growing circuit whose internal energy is possessive and consumptive, a being of demonic speed. Through the past we justify the actual and through the future we limit the possible. All time spirals around its center – capital, the measure of value in motion, the junk pile of pasts consuming potential futures. With experience eclipsed by exchange, Leviathan suffocates possibility.

The Four Horsemen stumble through empty streets. War begins from patriarchs clamoring over property, turning bodies into weapons and crushing life underneath hooves of nickel. Pestilience vapors up from city sewers, plebeians stepping over the unhoused to move through the nothingness between work and home. Famine molds from full granaries, the drive for profit transforming into unbreakable locks on communal refrigerators, prosperity doubling as starvation. In the end, the Leviathan reveals itself as death, the drive to annihilation, capital accumulating faster and faster until apocalypse, the shattering of life through climate catastrophe. The night-mare rides into view, the haunting of history, ghosts of infinite futures mourning eternity. Reform is revealed as a failing brake, snapped reigns slowing nothing.

Our only hope is to crash the time machine.

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History“

Image: The Horse Rider, Marc Chagall (1949-1953)

“We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return…”

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Matter and spirit blend in rhythmic unity. The mind echoes into the world and the world into the mind, animation as echoic symphony, libidinal riffs of embodied motion constituting consciousness – the tap-tk-tk-tap-tap of the full-yet-empty self. There is nothing that separates me from the rain; I am a garden. The world within me is the same as the world outside me, cosmos in cosmos in cosmos, the melody of spirit-matter.

Life grows by echopraxy. You spin, I spin. I dance, you dance. Motion makes and mirrors multiplicity. Evolution is funk – bass slaps vibrating organisms out into polyrhythm. Genes grow and giggle together; lungs cast amoebas and muscles vine over galaxies. We breathe in ontologies, the hyperpoxia of being. Stellar structures wobble in quantum potential at the level of spacetime foam, the All present in the modal landscape of reality. From possibility into the whole of time, infinities upon infinities cascading out into fractal topology, the echoic drive of transformative difference. Spirit-matter spins Pan into the pluricosmos.

Pan both precedes and succeeds Leviathan. Animal-being, plant-being, species-being, lifeways of cosmic consciousness bubbling through phylogenetic forests. If the Leviathan is a gnostic apocalypse, then Pan is queer anarchy, spirit-matter rioting against abstraction and domination. Queer anarchy collapses echoic waves into a dense ocean of syncopation; galloping into faster-arriving worlds, desire shatters simulacra, fragmenting the image of capital through subverting its mystical unity. Creaturely begotten into forests of utopia, Pan weaves bird feathers into bricks projectiled through palace windows. Sous les pavés, la plage!

Frogs bribbit L’Internationale. “…to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” (Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology) This is not life as it is arranged under capital, the marketplace of fiefdoms, human relationship replaced by exchange and quantification. Pan is the joining of all with all in mutual play and self-creation, the negation of the social factory through the defeat of value, the seizing of the time machine, the revolutionary transformation of quantity into quality. As the ungovernable wildness of the multiple claws out from monadic imperium, Pan slays the Leviathan.

“All power to the imagination!”

May 1968 Slogan

Image: Constellation: Toward the Rainbow, Joan Miró (1941)