Fish In the Afternoon

In the abyss, God desires.

Whole fragment of spiritual flesh, Sophia haloing ecstatic into embodied creation. Matter becomes through yearning. Why is there anything rather than nothing? Why is there many rather than none? Because of love, ache. Because of first desire, the inhabiting of the nothing that calls out to everything and in so doing fractures into kaleidoscopic modality, possibility emanating from longing. God is because God loves; creation is because creation desires.

To be is to be-with – initially zero and then two. The one is the consequent of the two, the many. Cycles of time are erotic rhythms, cosmic sexuality flowing into multiplicity, love letters flaring into possible worlds. David Lewis was right – all possible things exist, actuality wrapping over spatiotemporal holes into infinity – but what he missed was the desire behind it, the longing of the universe to be through becoming. First love, then God and creation.

Love is incarnation, creative potential flowing into formed inhabiting, desire becoming being through dwelling. We cannot know without loving and cannot be without being-with, possibility becoming necessity through committing ourselves to the good of another, to the good of the world. Modality sings Sophia, wisdom vibrating with the holiness of eros, longing shimmering with potential and potential radiating into ecstatic union. To be is to intertwine, allowing ourselves to unfold through attending to the unfolding of another, the soul developing through a harmonics of intersubjectivity.

Love is the root of knowledge, that which makes knowing possible, the desire within desire that bursts into revelation. We cannot know without loving, for to know is to dwell in the thisness of another, to be-with the world. Love is the precondition for possibility and possibility is the precondition for knowledge.

In the abyss, God loves.

Image: Creation, from the outside shutters of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510)

hoo- hoo- hoo- ta-weet ta-weet ta-weet tk tk tk

Meadowlark. Old willow draped in a green dress.

The spirits never left us; the ghosts remain. Through machinery, capital de-sacralizes the land. Devouring rationality, the monstrosity at the heart of exchange, the demon of accumulation specters in from the shallow, the abstraction of the deep.

Animal heartbeats push into virtual unfeeling. The worlds beneath us, the seeds within us, the companions around us simulacra’d into electrochemical icons. The hypercosmos of capitalist modernity infects being and sublimates it into non-being, capital.

Bluesong. Weeping forest in a funeral veil.

ta-weet ta-weet ta-weet hoo- hoo- hoo- echo – alali – a – alali – a – tk tk tk

Softfellow. Petalvine skipping in nothing.

The spirits inhabit us; the ghosts touch. Through the land, love leaves the logic of capital. Touching feeling, the desire within desire, chaosmos of belonging in difference, the pluricosmos of fractal being breathes and welcomes us into the deep.

In the beginning was Sophia. The thought before thought that was also matter before matter. The form of the holy resonating into sonic ontologies. A principle of contradiction ferning into spiral galaxies. Pinpoint quarks wobble with fibrous consciousness in the cosmic dirt.

echo – alali – a – alali – a – alali – a – alali – a – alali – a – on and on and on

ta-weet

Image: Vase of Flowers by Jan Fyt

I believe in you. I believe in me. There is nothing else but us.

Touch grass, if you can find it. Grasping apes, upright-walkers hunting through the ice, bacterium bursting into self-consciousness. The split between the before, the now, and the after is the invention of the Human.

There is no Human in nature. The Human is a category of fissure, a rupture in God’s self-understanding. Terrified of its animality, the Human severs itself from the flux and creativity of being, architecting an Atlantean -topia above the rhizome of nature. Arboreal fear of dirt asthmatically blocking off roots and cutting off tunnels of nutrients, the Human peels into simulacra, an image of what the imagination images itself to be.

Capital is a Moloch pulling us forward into the realm of forms, a cybernetic arche leading to abstraction. The goal of capitalism is forgetting, a reverse anamnesis obscuring life. Trapped in Hades, the soul sinks into Styx, dragged into the underneath below Tartarus. “…capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance of power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital.” (Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave and Other Essays) Proletarianization is one link in a chain that tries to block us from community, from finding wholeness in the multiplicity and flowing chaosmosis of life.

The Human is a Demiurge. Not human beings, homo sapiens, beings of joy and hope and creativity and flesh and breath, but The Human (TM), that which separates us from the world, from materiality. At the level of point particles, the universe is enminded, the body of God in infinite multiplicity. God has a body and our body is her body. The act of becoming Human is the act of separating oneself off from this body, being fearful of passion, energy, creativity, life, joy, excess, love, magic, art, pleasure, desire, friendship, and community. The Human is a gnostic apocalypse, the fading of the material into the technic, the hubristic terror of machinic libido shaving down the non-Euclidean geometries of nature into Leviathan. Eden is the nightmare of power.

The only hope for humanity is the rejection of the Human in favor of the cosmic us, the loving embrace of the other as a concrete site of embodied self-consciousness.

I believe in you. I believe in me. I believe in us and nothing else.

Image: The Angel of Hearth and Home, Max Ernst (1937)

An earthquake struck in ’92. The aether ripped, frost from the overhead slipping into the architecture. Shuddering freckles of cobalt collapse into lithium mines warred over by techtonic cataclypse. Swarm.

Sometimes when you are queer the future can occur before the past.

Growing up frozen in temporal veins, branching paths lead back to premature adulthood, a ghost of an imagined future pressing into the present, blocking the development of the past. I was born in ‘9X. The USSR collapsed into Gorbachev-cum-Yeltsin, a Reaganing of the alternative. Fresh pressed flowers gored into WASP loafers. At the end of history, I begin.

Y2K, the clocks stop. Hardboiled Nostradamus melts yolk over the History Channel, a chronoclypse paraded into drooled-over annihilation. Now erased, the beforeshadows of conspiracy excavate false pasts. We grew up in virtuality, a representation of a representation spun through a rewound VHS. At the turn of the Millennium, just as use collapsed into exchange and exchange collapsed into the universal form, as the universal form became money and money became credit, credit became its own image, the circulation of pure significance, a shout in the dark spectering falsely through unaired air. Fizzle, the white noise poltergeist of a million signals in conscious spoken symboling.

George W. Bush stole the election in 2000. Or, the Brooks Brothers did. Or, the Supreme Court did. Or, Pat Buchanan did. Or, Donald Trump did. Or, Joe Biden did. Or, or, or. The procedure of democracy replaces its content. Democracy, cannibalized by the 80s, becomes an image transposed onto a digital flag flickering over the ruins of the return of history, tragedy peaking into the real at 9/11.

Crush. Terror. The purgatory of puberty bubbling into PTSD-driven reactive adulthood. Echolalia-alolaclypse ticcsoverto tardive dyskinesia.

(Blank.)

In cycles of queer time, our temporal orientation is reflected back into itself, forcing us into a project of re-engineering our own autobiography. In abjection, the squick horror of being crip cracks the body into artifacts arranged throughout spacetime. The goal of crip/queer narrative is archeology, the excavating of the shattered queer us, queer I, into a mythos of resistance. Queer time is inherently anti-fascist, incapable of being incorporated into the palingenetic apocalypse of the zombified nation-state. Rejecting the question of coherence, queerness rejects the potential of authority, the name-of-the-father shouting in the background of the ego.

Sometimes when you are queer the past is an echo of the present and the future is an act of history.

Image: Birth of a Galaxy, Max Ernst