Fish In the Afternoon

Togethering

November 22nd, 2024

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. – Heraclitus, fragment DKB89

My soul grows in the earth of your soul; your soul grows in the earth of mine.

The soul is the fully unfolded life of the Unique. In this unfolding, the placetime of the Unique’s becoming is planted, world-entanglement birthing the world-as-it-appears within the garden of being-in-time. The soul is a physical thing, a here-now that is incarnated in our intertwining, the world revealing itself through our being-in-the-world. I am here-now in this placetime. I am here-now in the soul. I am here-now with-you. I am here now. It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here now.

Loving you is not an accident, not incidental, not abstract. I fall for you and trip into a new here-now, a placetime that is birthed in our loving, which inaugurates our world. Our. There is no separation – the world I inhabit appears to me as it does in my unfolding, but it always does so in my unfolding-with-you, my unfolding-with-the-world. There is no unfolding-alone. Souls overlap one another, dwelling in the common placetime that grows in our entangled activity. The here-now we form is the real — the world is always-and-already a here-now with-you, and there is no world other than -with. There is no private language because there is no private world.

The world that I am is a world that appears only in its intertwining with other worlds and with the commons cosmos. Ontological pluralism does not bottom out in worlds, but in fractals: worlds-in-worlds-in-worlds, planets-in-solar-systems-in-galaxies. The world I am repeats and transforms the worlds I dwell in and the worlds I dwell in repeat and transform the worlds that constitute them. The garden roots and the garden flowers. In forming a world-with-another, we apocalypse, unwinding the interiority of our world-appearing to open-ourselves to another world’s revealing. Love is always apocalyptic, as to love requires stepping-out-of the solipsism of one’s own experience to re-orient towards the commons, our intended-attention becoming a path through which we navigate out of our isolation. Love is attending to the unfolding of another, and one attends through dwelling in the common placetime formed through the intertwining of beloved-and-beloved, grazing grass with their fingertips and dipping their feet in the cool water of the pluricosmos. I love you and I dwell with you in our common unfolding. I love you and I present with you, unearthing our pasts like a well-loved photo album, holding-you-close in our futuring. Love saunters the cosmos of you-and-I; you-and-I plant the future of our togethering. Together we together our common-soul.

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Image: Skating Rink ‘Dynamo’ by Pyotr Konchalovsky (1948)
Transitions #6

November 12th, 2024

You want them to notice the ragged hem of your summer dress. You want them to see you like they see every other girl. But they just see a faggot. They hold their breath not to catch the sick. – Laura Jane Grace, Transgender Dysphoria Blues

Content note: transphobic slurs

Gaze. The quiet (loud) quiet looking. The other-orienting, the other-negating. The allos.

Staring. What does it mean to be stared at by an entire country? Where is the gaze of America drawn, where does the eye of its machinic libido fall? Trump. They keep using “storm” language. Hurricanes emerging, tornadoes swarming. Some dick on the internet says a storm is coming and suddenly NY Times columnists think they’re clever. As if the mob wasn’t already storming. Swarming, storming. Staring.

Do you know what it feels like to be dragged into the public sphere, to become an image of gender-terror screamed out by fascists — at the end, Trump spews a paroxysm of transphobia, gumming-up the radiowaves with psychosexual imaginaries of men-in-dresses, criminal men-in-dresses, groomers, traps, trannies. What is the left’s response? Harris calls hypocrisy and says Trump also gave healthcare to the transgendereds (we share the shame!) while the official opposition, the Green Party Nobody, gurgles something about men-in-women’s sports.

Are we nothing to you? Am I nothing to you?
America, what is it? Do you want me or not?

Do you want to kill me or fuck me? If it makes you sick to know we exist why do you keep saturating the world with your fantasies of us? We just want to exist and you call our existence a fetish – the fact that we breathe becomes a pornographic fact, and going out in public becomes a sex crime. Yet! We didn’t pornography ourselves, we were pornographied — we just want to live, but for you our lives are a psychosexual haunting. We don’t get a choice in the matter. We are the limit of freedom, a reminder that all of this is contingent. And that both entices and inflicts fear. And you don’t know. If you want to fuck us. Or kill us. Or be us.

All you know is you need Father to keep you safe.
And that maybe if there weren’t so many trans people we wouldn’t have these problems.
And the world wouldn’t feel so scary.
And everything would be normal again.
And they wouldn’t have to think anymore.
About whether they want to fuck us.
Or kill us.
Or be us.

Cause at the end of the day, Father decides.

You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights. – Marsha P. Johnson

Image: Stormy Sea by Peter Balke (1870)
Transitions #5

November 10th, 2024

While there’s life there’s hope. – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

For Penelope. For hope.

How much time do I have to free you, scared little girl? How much time did you sleep in that dark closet, buried under histories barely-whispered, barely-spoken? How much did it hurt to hide from the degradation and the pain? Drifting alone in the hull of Noah’s ark, sailing-away and waking-up again, not you. How much time have you been here inside me? Is it warm or cold? Scared adult woman. How did you survive? Please reach out to me, I’ll offer you a hand. Please, I need your help.

They tried to put you in a camp. They [redacted] you and broke you and taught you that the only love you deserve is the kind that hurts. The kind that violates you, that feels like your skin is burning and your life belongs to someone else. They told you to never tell anyone. You told people and it didn’t matter. But you fought and you bit and you scratched and you bled and you bruised and you spit. And your body kept hurting. And your skin kept burning. And you kept fighting. And burning. And fighting. And burning.

I see you, I glimpse you, for the first time. Adrift in the sea of 2024, I spy you. You through the soft guidance of another, I see you. You through gritted-teeth, I see you. And you’re scared. And you’re trying to see the light. And the dark from the cave continues to creep in. Little girl, who never got to be a little girl. Adult woman, womaning in the world with no direction. Little girl, who bubbled up in play, who rolled in the grass and collected bugs in the dirt and scraped her knee on the asphalt. Little girl, who made-up worlds that she could explore and escape in, where she was free. Little girl, unable to breathe and forced to shove-down memories until you get sick. Until they try to put you in a camp. Little girl.

Adult human woman. I see you. I’m here for you. I am you. Penelope, hold on. The deep dark has been there all along and you know what lies down there. But the spirit that keeps thumping restless in your heart is there too. The spirit that hums love whenever Katie is around. The spirit that dances freedom whenever jazz is on the radio. The spirit that smiles equality surrounded by trees and singing birds. The spirit that was ever-ever-womaning, even when my body was not. The spirit that is me, even when I feel so far away. Glimpsing you, barely, barely, through the porthole of dysphoria, of dissociation and depersonalization, of fear fear fear, I see you.

And I’m here. And I’ve got you.

Don’t throw away the hero in your soul. Hold your highest hopes holy. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Image: The Coming Storm by Winslow Homer (1901)
The Common-Soul

November 1st, 2024

Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it. – Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, & Unity

Common. All. Together. Shared. Soul. The fully-unfolded life of the Unique. Common-Soul. The shared and fully-unfolded life of the community-of-communities.

Everything is Unique, itself-in-itself and irreplaceable by any other. Each Unique uniques, or unfolds as that-which-it-is. The totality of this unfolding is the soul, the essence or form that the Unique takes in-itself. Every Unique unfolds in a world, as a world, among worlds. In-the-world, the Unique finds-itself appearing in a moment of many-unfoldings, the echoic sea of the already unfolding creating-begetting-proceeding of life-itself. As-a-world, the Unique unfolds a way-of-being that is particular to itself, en-formed by the Unique enfleshment of the anima that the Unique animates and the way that the Unique matters matter in its unfolding. Among-worlds, the Unique unfolds in a space-between other Uniques, each unfolding in their overlapping uniquing and intertwining in togethers, or shared-uniquings of unique togethers.

In-a-world, as-a-world, among-worlds, the unique togethering of each together intertwines with the togethering of others, forming a community, a together-of-togethers conjoined in their common unfolding. These communities themselves are togethers that join with other togethers in their common unfolding, birthing the community-of-communities. Each Unique unfolds their soul as the totality of their uniquing, en-habiting and en-worlding the many placetimes that grow in that unfolding. These placetimes are likewise planted in the unfolding of the togethers that these Uniques form, incarnating the commons, which is the shared-placetime of the unfolding of a community. The totality of the intertwining of all togethers in the community-of-communities, understood in terms of the whole of that unfolding, is the common-soul, whose commons is the cosmos and whose placetime is creation-itself.

The flourishing of each Unique as the good-that-it-is and in the good-that-it-makes depends on how their uniquing is joined in these patterns of togethers, tying the good of each Unique to the good of the togethers it is a part of. The good of each together then intertwines with the together-of-togethers, which itself intertwines with the community-of-communities. In committing ourselves to the good of a Unique, we then commit ourselves to the good of the togethers we together with that Unique, and ultimately to the community-of-communities that we form with all. This commitment is incarnated in the commons of our togethering, being en-habited and en-worlded in the intertwined, en-timed, and en-placed unfolding of each Unique. In intimately-committed togethers, this commons is the doma, the shared-placetime that incarnates the love of the together, soul-mates tending to the garden of the doma in attending to one another. This doma is the hearth of the good where each Unique is lovingly-brought-into ethical subjectivity, en-forming their own commitments and togetherings and en-habiting the good of the common-soul in en-habiting the good of their own unfolding. The good of all dwells in the good of each and the good of each dwells in the good of all.

To become who we are, we must become the cosmos.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature. – Baruch Spinoza, Ethics prop. 29

Image: Flowers of the Universal Flowering by Pavel Filonov (1916)
Transitions #4

October 28th, 2024
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. – Plato, Phaedo

Apophasis. The cis soul denies, moves-away-from the dawn that beckons in the dark night. The problem they face is an allic problem: because they witness themselves as standard, they can’t recognize themselves as a one-in-many / many-in-one. The cis soul is one pattern of the pattern of gender, one echoic history in an endless sea. But it cannot see itself as one-among-others because its ontology rests on sovereignty. It is Leviathanic: it is that whose power is assumed, whose power grounds the many in one structure of authority. The cis soul can go so far as to say there are deviations from itself, but it cannot go so far as to say the gender they dwell in is not a privileged standard.

Souling as a woman and souling as a man are not reducible to souling as cis – to center cisness in one’s womaning and maning. The contradiction at the heart of the cis soul is that in sewing one’s cisness so close to the soul as to be inseparable, this cis identity clouds one’s gendering. In grounding their activity in their cisness, the cis soul must guard against any rupture to its sovereignty, any indication that the duadic form of cis gender-lives is one-among-many. One can only be a woman so far as one’s womaning fits with the duadic form of the cis soul; one can only man as a reflection of that form. The mistake here is the same that pervades civilization: to make-real the form at the expense of forgetting that that form is grounded in those-who-form. Commodity fetishism is one form of a greater idolatry, one that appears-again in the contradiction of the cis soul. The fundamental move of souling as cis is to forget one’s womaning and maning and to instead identify with the duadic form of cis men and cis women – to relocate their own activity to an idol that they created.

None of this is to say that the categories of cis and trans are empty. One can meaningfully identify as a cis woman or a trans woman because it identifies one within the social background within which one womans. However, there is a difference between identifying with one’s womanhood as a woman who has already been socially identified as a woman (that is, being a cis woman), and identifying with one’s place within the cis duad rather than one’s one womaning. The question is where the activity lies: does one woman as the woman they are, or do they woman according to the system that womans them? Breaking away from the cis soul, even while remaining cis, requires uprooting the sovereignty of cisness and relocating it in themselves, in others, and in the world. It requires anamnesis: re-membering oneself as the one-who-forms to escape the prison of the form.

The sad thing about Plato is he never did get out of that cave.
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O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,

I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)

I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems…

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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Image: About nightfall. Grove. By Isaac Levitan (1880)

Togethering

Transitions #6

Transitions #5

The Common-Soul

Transitions #4