And that’s the trouble
with love
compassion calls for
cerebral suicide
amour—irrational—
and we all know it
inamorata—insanity—
both begin with
I.

And what is the
I
dentity of love
what is the Other?
Other than of course
a public form
appearance
and appearance is
seven tenths of the last battle
of the war of love that leads
to possession
which is two tenths
of the law.

There is a meadow
and the grass is green
and stinks of mildew
and Eden is illusion
(begins with I)
paradise a paradox
infinite pleasure
is infinite pain
the two twisted oxymoronic
together like lovers
in the throes
of passion—

The two
wrenched together
impassioned
(I’m passioned)
the I
always emergent
solipsism in sincerity
emotion—austerity
(inaction)—
and love in action
screams and moans
and wails—
is a tree fallen in the forest
makes a sound
metaphysics minced
by the barreling brevity
of the matter.

Bodies are nothing but matter
and love
Real Love
(Singular Love)
is implosive
(I’m plosive—
I pop, sputter, rasp)
Real Love—
onomatopoetic
Real Love—
stoic, chaste,
celibate
even rung from the bellies
of bodies

Twisted together
paradoxes
the paradigm for passion
love love love
is devotion
(Shantih Shantih Shantih)
so why then should it ever be
(an Other)
anything other than
ascetic?

—

“Leave the light on, please.”

Those were the words she said to me then, in her typically casual and polite tone. The corners of her mouth curved like the swollen blossoms of an apple tree. Her cheeks, blooming with warmth, appeared backlit and artificial in the fluorescent luminescence of the room. Her bra dangled from her left shoulder blade, her left breast half-covered. A message in a bottle, its neck gasping for air in the raging of the sea. And the right was completely exposed–naked, not nude.

—

Our first encounter occurred in a physical haze of cigarette smoke, both of us in a spiritual daze from too much alcohol and an evening’s worth of bad company.

Bar light has a way of coloring everything not quite the way you want it to. That is to say, it makes you see people the way they ought to be seen at all times. The pretty girls flush green after one too many drinks–green with envy at the bratty boys paying them no heed–the man behind the counter feigns a consolatory smile, and his teeth are stained like the soiled sheets of a one-night stand. The faux-punks in their designer leather jackets playing pool in the corner? Their palette never changes. They’ve got nothing to prove because they aren’t worth proving.

Nihilism is nihilism, even in the iridescent glow of a Seattle dive. And levity is still a non-option in the perpetual fog of liquor logic. Bar light weighs more than air; it sinks into your skin, pulls you to the floor. Your feet feel heavy, like anchors or anvils. You become a machine. Automata. A wave to the barkeep, a fumbling for the wallet, a knocking back and a burning throat after the clinking of glasses.

—

With the lights on, and her bra dangling, dangling, dangling like the stoic arm of a grandfather clock, I remembered the bar tab in my jeans pocket. It was a docier demonstrating who really wore the pants in this relationship: me with the grandmother drinks–the whiskey sours and the Tom Collins–and her with unbreakable guts drinking bad house gin by the pint, “because the wells always run dry,” she said.

But both pairs of our pants lay on my floor, and the pretty girl was in my bed. Not bar pretty, either. Pretty pretty. The kind you take home to mother. The kind who looks like your mother.

The psychology of a one-night stand is not something that can be healthily reflected upon when the experience is actively occurring. An Oedipus complex doesn’t serve to enhance sexual performance. Nor does it help that my mother’s been dead now for three years.

Now is not the time for the ego to be fully conscious. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems as though self-perceived matricide and the act of making love should always be mutually exclusive.

But the whiskey has washed away my mind’s self-restraint, and tonight it seems will be another night when fucking and philosophy go hand-in-hand. Fucking philosophy.

Who the hell thinks about Socrates while they are making out with a pretty girl?

I do, apparently.

Her bra has fully fallen off. Fallen, like some angel from the heavens, some bored divinity who has taken to reading too much William Blake. The fall always begins with a question. In our case, it happened to come from me. “Would you like to come back to my place?” How nonchalant. How casual.

Casual. What an interesting word. Especially in the context of a drunken evening, when the letters seem so easily to rearrange themselves to spell “causal.” Casual sex. Causal sex. But what’s the point? What’s the effect?

An empirical approach to the act of making love seems no better at present than an ontological one. And teleology is simply out of the question. The end of the means that is a drunken hookup? A chance for disease, a feeling of emptiness. How quaint. With her bra off and the lights on, I’m looking for God in the satiation of empty sexual desire.

Emptiness. The silence that both beckons and responds to the ringing of a bell. The precursors and the pauses between her groans of pleasure. The writhing and the reeling. The one and the sameness. Free imitation. The act of making love is a mimetic maneuver.

And now I’m thinking about Schelling while doing far more than making out with a pretty girl. And now the tail of the devil, that curls itself into an audacious question mark, is changing the shape of its inquiry toward me: “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

The fuck is wrong with me. And that is the fucking problem. The fucking is the problem.

As I grope below her belt line, I’m looking for something to fill up the emptiness. But the fluid of sex is no less intoxicating (and thus no less hollow) than the fluid of alcohol. And the fluidity always gets sweated out, either way. Whether heaving with sobs in a drunken fit, or heaving with sighs in ecstatic pleasure, one is, nonetheless, heaving.

Heaving. Heave. Heavy. There is no levity, not in the bar light and not in the bedroom.

Sex is an unbearably transient pleasure. It is a collaboration of two warm bodies with a wish for mutually assured destruction.

Orgasm. La petite mort. Small death.  In this enormous world, this infinity of nature that is the human home, we are all just vessels for little deaths. The virgin is a body count to be. The lover is a walking corpse. In that context, how is this empty pleasure even remotely appealing?

And there, in the bedroom with the lights on, with our clothes stacked on the floor like a funeral pyre, I’m thrusting into her emptiness, searching for something to fill up the absence inside of me.

I am spelunking in the depths of her sex, in the blinding fluorescence of my run down apartment’s artificial light fixtures. And I can’t see anything. Blind is blind, in the inky darkness of the unknown and in the harrowing illumination of the truth.

And, the truth be told, all I am doing is blindly fucking a girl, digging myself further and further and fucking further into the abyssal depths of her emptiness, into the very fluid of her femininity. I am drowning in the endlessness of her self-contained nothingness, the light at the end of the tunnel glowing whiter and whiter with every sigh, every moan, every mutter of approval uttered from her apple orchard orifice. And I’m cupping her overexposed nipples, holding her nakedness like a fistful of love.

But am I loving her (causal sex)?

Or am I merely making love to her (casual sex)?

—

And as the artificial light refracts itself from the newfound fluidity of sex, as the sweat descends and dances in kamikaze spirals, swallowing fluorescence and spitting it out again like rainbows, as my sex and her sex are united in sex and we feel OH! so confident in our liberated, positively-charged sexuality–our sexual attraction toward the negativity of the goddamn endless nothing in her nethers and in my nudity–as the room spins and the sweat descends the rainbows come and go and come and go and she says she’s going to come again,

I’m thinking about Leibniz. And I’m coming to the conclusion that the human is merely a monad, and that every outward projection is just a perversion of inward reflection. And my exhausted, orgasm-rattled other is merely a figment of my own self-evident imagination.

Reflection. Reflect. Reflex. Orgasm is a nervous tick. Excitement begets ejaculation begets post-coital emancipation.

You are free, my love. Free from the causality of sexual attraction. From the biological of erotic sensation. That is what I’m telling her between heaving sighs as I pull myself out of the emptiness of the negative space between her thighs.

And she is free. Free to be casual, with the lights on and her clothes off and the sweat mingling with the scent of sex like we mingled together ourselves in search of our own personal little deaths. And our pants are on the floor and I am panting–no, heaving–and my heavy handed question came to a startling, striking conclusion.

And as I start reflecting on the weight of the situation, she, with all her typical politeness, lifts her heavy eyelids with a light tilt of her pretty, pretty face, and as a bead of scented sweat crawls down her forehead, toward her apple orchard lips, she whispers (whispers):

“thank you.”

And in between the clockwork blinks beget by her bedroom eyes, I can see that she glowing.

But hers is not a bar lit beaming or a fluorescent flickering. It is a glow come panicked, helpless from within. A firefly in a mason jar. A mirror in a monad.

And casual and causal are united once more in the levity of her flushed, sweat-christened skin.

In exordium, illic eram nusquam. Nusquam. Nihil.

In the beginning, there was nothing. And then, from some supreme, supersensible something, there arose the logos: the inner word. The inner word turned outward by that supersensibility, that divinely prominent something whose existence exceeds the capacity of the logos it created. Theos kat’ exochen?

Logos is Theos kat exochen. Logos is the selfness of nothing, the self qua self ex nihilo, pointing itself from the internality of the nihil to the externality of the objective, corporeal word. It is incorporeality corporealized.
—
“Maybe I’m just crazy, but do you ever feel like there are just words rushing through your head, just patterns of words that seemingly came out of nowhere?”

That is the logos. A birthing, a bubbling up. A pushing outward of the internal monologue which haunts the people in the world who are truly Dionysian. The logos is the angst of the artist.

Angst. For Kierkegaard, it means a feeling of unease that emerges from no particular. From the universal nothing? Angst is the causa sui something of the nihil. It is the liminal space between the nothing and the preeminently something. Angst is the Dionysian kat’ exochen. It terrifies, rends assunder, ravages the body, the soul, the mind, the other, but in its destructive existence it contains a self-same capacity for creation.

Creatio ex nihilo est creatio ad nihilo.

Life, then, is merely any given being’s participation in the something that appears between the bookends of the nihil. Life is the exodus ex nihilo ad nihilo, the travail of somethingness in the midst of inimitable nothingness.

(Aphorisms:)

If life lends spacial relevance to the infinite nihil of existence, then love defines its contours.

When I wake up kissing the curve of your clavicle, I know what it means to know something true.

And what does it mean to wake up?

To be born again through the destructive act of procreation. Sex dissolves in order to reconfigure, recreate, reimagine. Carnal love is crop rotation. And human beings all have the capacity to be ever so energy efficient.

An angel loves too real to see. Or, an angel moves too fast to see. Thomas Aquinas rejected physical love, but firmly believed in the reality of the angelic. And herein lies the Christian contradiction.

William Butler Yeats made love in the luminescence of the angelic. And William Butler Yeats has since written love forever in the margins of the minds of mankind.

What prompts nothingness to exist kat’ exochen?

In its unreality, it is at all times ubiquitously real. In its untime, it is eternally present in all things. All things are extended. Natura naturans. God is nature. God is love. Deus kat’ exochen est Deus ex nihilo est Deus ex natura.

Love’s profundity is grounded in love’s profanity. The god’s don’t love. They agape. Theirs is too eternal, too transcendental. There is nothing real about the eternal; eternity is an irrelevance in the exodus ex nihilo et ad nihilo.

The sins of the flesh validate the flesh. Because flesh incorporeal becomes concept-flesh, subject-flesh, and the other is always object. The lover is always object. And like Ozymandias, the lover always must be crumpled into dust to leave their legacy.

There is nothing autonomous about love. Love is codependent, symbiotic–at its worst, parasitic.

Love is mutual assured destruction. Love (eros) is existenz ad nihilo.

And that is why we must love. We must all be lovers in order to complete the persona’s pilgrimage from somethingness to nothingness. There is no other way. Understanding comes in the destruction of love. This is why lovers ravage each other. This is why love is vindictive moreso than it is a vindication.

Love is the end with a bang, not a whimper. Eros est Dionysos.

The giver of life, the bringer of death. Creator and destroyer. Harbinger of nihil and anti-nihil together. The Dionysian is self-consciousness consciously and perpetually and eternally terminating its selfhood-as-something. The Dionysian annihilates. The self qua self kat’ exochen creates its own destruction.

And such is the prerogative of seduction. Passion, eros, love: this is abolition. The birthing of nothing out of something. Creatio ad nihilo est eros.

Love is nothing. And that means it is the most important of all things; it is thing kat’ exochen.

Love is all.

As in, “I long for you,”
or with respect to the nature of “longing.”

And “long” is indeed a lonely word
because in its four letters
is contained the breadth of infinity
strung up like Christ on the crucifix,
his final cry echoing: ”forsaken me.”

The “forsaken me.”
The cogito, flipped upside-down–
the ego standing out
amidst the vast ocean
of existential doubt.
The sins of the flesh acknowledged as such–
Passion vs. The Passion.

And which of these wins in this withered world of ours?

Both.
Or neither.
Either/Or.

For one must suffer to become enlightened:
Aeschylus, mirrored in Oedipus.
And whether on the cross
(and covered in Calvary scars),
or in the act of crossing over
(Passion expressed as Prestupleniye),
the eros is alive and well,
and waiting for the heart to swell:

King Lear was, in fact, a tragedy.
One that ended with a heart
burst smilingly.

And maybe that’s a bit like life:
the best moments are those that find
our heroes and heroines marching,
marching, marching toward death–
waiting for that moment when their souls
will burst forth from their chests
ever so smilingly.

And “long” is a lonely word because
that smiling burst, for most of us,
shall be far too long in coming
thanks to the modern age,
and its newfound longevity.

Which rhymes with brevity,
which reminds of the moment
which captures the breadth of infinity
(which is found in the briefness of
that aforementioned word)
as a breath of infinity.

I have a recurring dream. It comes perhaps once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. But it always comes. It comes whenever my mind becomes too overloaded, when the material world starts to ooze its way into my head, and my thoughts turn away from metaphysics and toward micromanagement.

In this dream, I live in the mountains, at the edge of a forest, by a disarmingly clear pond full of aquatic life. The pine trees shelter squirrels and raccoons, and there are fox holes and rabbit holes and nests for sparrows and owls and ospreys and eagles.

And the only things I have to my name are a log cabin–constructed with my bare hands–a guitar, a shelf full of books, a fountain pen and a couple flats of paper.

There is a gas stove in the corner, and on it rests a pot and a frying pan. A well pumps water into a basin, for dishes and bathing and the rinsing of wild berries.

And it all sounds so cliche, I know. But in the dream it feels so correct. It reminds me of my youth, when my parents would practice nurture in the context of nature, when I could identify 75 kinds of trees, 300 flowers and 150 birds by their scientific names from memory. When my emptiness meant beginner’s mind, and not broken mind. When care and carelessness walked hand-in-hand, like lovers in their 80′s after 50 years of marriage.

And in the dream I am reflecting on my life as I gaze upon my reflection in the water. I am monadizing. I am indivisible, concealed, but never incapable of directing my internal monologue outward at a more idyllic end.

And in waking, and speaking of this dream, I am convinced this monadic approach to reflection is in fact the idyll itself. Paradise is contented self-reflection. Thoughts don’t race, but they rather rest in your head, like maidens on divans, unconscious and unconcerned. When your object-thoughts become subject-nonthoughts.

That is paradise. When everything clicks because the gears no longer feel the need to grind against each other. When wildness is the wildest because it comes to be as utter calm. And nowadays, the wildest things are the ones that don’t hustle and bustle. Stillness is the move.

The world’s preservation rests in the hands of a generation that cannot stop bobbing and darting and doing, a generation that doesn’t realize the secret to salvation is to just stop acting all the time.

Because the problem of acting is artifice.

I once dated a girl who took literally the Shakespearean notion that all the world is a stage. She would act irrationally, idiotically, recklessly, for the sake of eliciting a reaction from those around her.

In a less personal sense, the problem with our modern generation is that almost everyone seems to be motivated to behave in such a way as this. But activity for the sake of reactivity is painfully Newtonian and futile. And it always ends in inertia. But true passivity is the action of the absolute.

And, returning to my dream, I know in the world of dreams the notion of true passivity. True passivity is solitude.

Let us distinguish between the two sides of solitude:

Solitude (Thoreau): solidarity with nature, not with society.

Solitude (Kundera): “a sweet absence of looks.”

If I may note an issue with Kundera’s definition: even when one foregoes and overcomes the gaze of the other, one can never avoid the gaze of the self.

The problem of Kunderan solitude: the absence of the monad. Antimonad.

My dream is an extention of Thoreau’s solitude. I’ve had Kunderan solitude dreams before as well, but those are always frightening, haunting, and full of thought; they are ever the opposite of empty.

But emptiness, real no-thingness, comes when nature consumes the consumer, when materialism is devoured by the natural world around us.

Building, dwelling, thinking. The three should never be mutually exclusive, and the three should never be taken in an effort to usurp the grandeur, the vastness, of nature.

Because the grandest gestures are also the simplest. Simplicity is the most audacious of ideas. Simplicity is the most difficulty thing in the world.

That is why I can bear the cliche of my dream. Because my dream is simplicity incarnate. My dream is the simplest thing of all. Thoreau-solitude projected in the utter lucidity of sleep. Idyllic introspection pointed outward in the context of a necessary human activity. Activation without acting. Dynamism in transcendental stasis.

And here is where Kundera’s solitude finds its place. When you want to be alone, it is necessary to meditate on the nature of solitude in the throes of the other’s gaze.

When I want to be alone, I wander to a public place–a coffee shop, a park, a crowded street corner, a so-hip-it-hurts bar–and, in the context of a million othered gazes, I try to shut of my sight. To turn the mind inward. To monadize. This is how one attains solitude in the context of society, by shutting the blinds of the mind so the gaze of the other cannot penetrate the monad of the human soul.

Kunderan solitude is zen mind. Radical non-thought  in the context of social construct. Or, thought that ends with thought alone–thought itself thinking itself and itself only within its own self-imposed constraints. Thought monadized. The window is a mirror, but the only reflection it casts is the reflection of the self.

Philosophy in existence boiled down to a single idea, a single word: cogito. I Think.

That is the whole. The monad. That is solitude: self-realized self-thought about the thinking self.

Solitude: the absolute absence of all looks beyond the gaze of the self. Cogito. And nothing beyond the self. Solitude is the self-as-self, with no cognizance of the outside, the other, the chaos of the human-constructed world.

In my dream, l’eau claire est le monade. The water is the self, is self-reflection. The aquatic life is racing thought, and its visibility is a trick to distract from the essence of self-reflection: cogito and nothing beyond. When one ceases to see the fish, one sees only the self.

So it’s never about the other, the ex, the acquaintance. When my mother told me after the breakup with the actress that there were other fish in the sea, she neglected to inform me that I was not in fact obligated to acknowledge them.

The problem of Thoreau’s solitude: it presumes one must be alone to plumb the depths of the human soul. But solitude does not preclude the presence of the other; it only dictates that one must see beyond the other sometimes, that one must always keep the cogito in a cognitive domain where it can at any given moment usurp the gaze of the other.

The mirror shatters the window. The self overcomes. Cogito, ergo cogito, ergo cogito ad infinitum. Dynamism is eternal self-reflection via the monad of the self, the monad as the soul.

The essence (das Wesen) of man is the monad, the mirror. Sometimes it just takes an absence of the other to come to terms with dynamic self-reflection in the context of static society.

So that, then, is solitude: When the gaze of the other becomes the gaze of the organic. When the self sees the self and feels no need to seek other sights.

Cogito.

He is growing, changing, dangling by the scruff of his neck on a bough of the bushel of life. His mind is as a vegetable’s, but in fact he is a fruit. He is green, and his skin holds tight around his gooey interior–it seals him together like shrink wrap.

He knows his end–to be devoured whole by the eager lips of another. But there is a wait to be had, more growing to be done. Gestation leads to birth leads back to gestation. Everything must come full circle before anything can step forward. Crop rotation.

Love will awaken in the fall, when the girls step out of doors with their rain boots and their vintage dresses and their knitted hats, and they run to the fields to chase after the boys who fell from the vine.

By now the lover’s green skin has rouged, and he is soft and juicy and plump and veritably crimson, like a bruise or a carnivalesque blush. And the girls want to scoop the lover up in their pale, painted hands, like a mother would a baby, or a wounded bird.

And the tomato-heart-lover is a wounded bird, or he will be when the women have their rounds with him.

The problem of the lover: That everyone who seeks to love is afraid of getting sticky and dirty. Every girl ceases after the first bite.

And what happens when the lover’s sanguine skin is broken? Well, that’s when the sweetness turns all sour, when the insides start to turn and rot and fall apart.

The problem of love: Everyone wants a taste, but no one wants to swallow.

The remnants of love: sloughed tomato skin and lover’s spit.

The lover (masculine) is an unripe tomato. But what of the lover (feminine)? The one who bites? The one who does the picking, and the tasting, and the tossing away?

It would be too easy to call the lover (feminine) a black widow; the metaphor is too obvious. And again, she rarely ever swallows, and tearing a chunk out of is not equivocal with devouring one’s mate. And carnal love need not mean carnage-love.

So what, then, is the lover (feminine)?

The lover (feminine) is a surgeon. With her white latex gloves and her magnifying eye and her teeth that slice like scalpels. And her sutchers, her trump card, to sew the boy together again after she discovers a disinterest in his taste. The insides never tumble out, never turn rotten, because the lover (feminine) in an act of fond cruelty can stitch the broken skin together again.

This is the lifesaving grace of the lover (feminine). She keeps the boy in one piece, but after her light turns off and her gloves are tossed away, the boy is shuffled out on a stretcher; the next victim rises to the occasion.

And the boy, though sewn together perfectly like a pair of finely tailored trousers, will never be whole again. The bite has been taken, the juices sucked out, and now he is only skin. And empty too.

But he looks whole, and that’s the biggest problem. He is ushered off the dusty ground, whisked into a colander, shuffled inside to be saved from the coming frost of winter.

And back on the vine the next summer, his skin goes red again, and the girls come running back in their knitted hats and their antique dresses. And as always, they are hungry. And he’s fallen, and they scoop him up again like a baby or a wounded bird.

And they take another bite.

But the biggest problem of love: diminishing returns.

The lover (masculine) only has so much juice that can be sucked out. His skin can only be sewn over so many times before it ruptures beyond repair.

But the lover (feminine) always has her scalpel. The women always have teeth.

And the lover (masculine) is always overripe by the time he is cupped in a woman’s hands. And he is always too messy and sticky and gooey.

Love then, is not problematic because people can’t communicate.

Love is problematic, because it is a game of doctors playing farmers. Of organ harvesters attempting agricultural harvest.

The gravest form of miscommunication is vocational.

And love as such is a dangerous circle of incompatibilities.

“I speak.”

Of what? And how? And are you doing it this moment?

Certainly, the speaker in the above affirmation speaks. The phrase “I speak” does in fact validate its own activity. The speaker who speaks proves his capacity for speech and speaking, by affirming in action that both speech and the act of speaking are capacities within him that can be actualized. But this only proves that the speaker has the capacity for speaking, for eliciting an action which finds its potentiality within him. But it fails to address whether or not the speaker, in the moment, at any actualized moment of presence (that is the moment-as-the present), is capable of actualizing himself as the idea-in-action.

Enter the middle voice. The verb tense not known to the speaker of the English language. The tense wherein the one who is being bes. Of course the speaker can speak, but the speaker is not his speech, but rather he merely contains speech within his essence. And that essence is the idea, the actual absolute idea, that he cannot announce on any fundamentally useful level thanks to the confines of the English language.

The painter paints, but he is not his painting. Rather, only in the middle voice can a correct presentation of the essence of any action within its actor be announced. The middle voice describes self-actualizing: it expresses notions like the painting painting. Or the poem poeming. Or speaking speaking.

Baruch Spinoza was one of the first thinkers to grasp the power of the middle voice in the expression of the ideal of any given subject. With his explication of natura naturans (nature naturing), he discovered that things in themselves can only activate themselves in the world of the finite (the world of the real) on their own absolute and infinite terms. And this non-distinction between the subject and object expressions of any given essence is the middle voice. Nature natures, thought thinks, being bes, time times.

We wander aimlessly through life, most of us never able to grasp within ourselves a means by which to articulate the middle voice that most truly expresses the ideal that is our essence. We, as human beings, never think to simply be. Rather, we activate our latent capacities. We live. We die. We love. We hate. We work. We rest. We think. We speak. But we never be. Perhaps, probably, because we are too obsessed with figuring out what we are to accept that all of us are only ourselves.

The propensity for activity in the human being is a shared experience among all human beings. It signals our participation in the world of the real. But, as Immanuel Kant so clearly noted, this participation is purely phenomenal. The noumenal (that is, the essence of all things) remains closed to the human being as the human being participates in the phenomenal world.

Granted, we are phenomenal beings. We do in fact exist in the phenomenal world. And we have no choice in that matter. Our existence as substantial compositions dictates that we must exist in the realm of the phenomenal, as phenomena have substance (reality), whereas noumena have only essence. Noumena, things-in-themselves, are intrinsically insubstantial.

But then there are the bridges. Those ideas that, in their purest forms, their most essential forms, can exist both noumenally and phenomenally, at least insofar as such a thing is remotely possible. Substance insubstantial, ideal actualized, essence-in-existence. Nature naturing. Time timing.

So what’s the trouble with being being?

The trouble is that, the moment being bes, it proceeds to have been. In comes the second part of Spinoza’s nature, the notion of natura naturata (nature natured). For the human being, there is never a moment which ceases to be a moment. Everything that happens, as soon as it happens, has already happened. The bridge-idea of time disintegrates the possibility of being being. It traps the moment (the awakening of the essence of any thing-in-itself) in the realm of the phenomenal, while its essence longingly waves goodbye from the realm of the noumenal. All the human being can do is be as a series of recollected actions because no one can radically be in any indefinite sense.

There is in typical everyday life no such thing as the moment. There is only recollection (nostalgia) and anticipation (angst, desire). There is no stasis, only dynamism. No calm, just activation and decay.

The lover can never truly love in the most essential of terms. The moment he loves, he has already loved, and loves no longer in that moment. That is why love is treated by a special few as an absolute, a noumenal, an ideal, and by the rest as a word, a statement, a truth-made-lie by the perils of time.

“Living is life’s participation in death.”

An extraordinary man recently told me that. Life is no more noumenal than any other activity; if anything, it is radically less noumenal. As life is never essential, but merely incidental.

But love…

I’m convinced love can be noumenal, and not just a grandiose phenomenal illusion. The lover invariably must participate in the phenomena of love, but perhaps… perhaps the lover loving, in the right state, with the right mentality, with a proper philosophical understanding, can be reinterpreted as follows: being being in tandem with love loving. When the being can be as love loves, perhaps then the eternity, the essence of love can be unlocked in the realm of existence. Phenomena and noumena. Action and reaction. Subject and object.

I want to live in a state of non-dichotomous existence. I want to love noumenally in the realm of the phenomenal. I want my temporal existence to be absolute, my actions to be finite expressions of the infinite ideal of activity.

But all of these thoughts are just words, appearing ex post facto as a recollection of my thoughts. This aspiration toward the noumenal is inherently phenomenal.

And that is the crux of the matter.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Anticipation is participation in the phenomenal iteration of time. And timeless, eternal, essential love can look neither forward nor backward, just as the moment cannot be anticipated or recollected.

And there you have it, the floodgates of my mind. Always flowing, never fallow. Always dynamic and pointed toward a future, never statically contented in the moment.

The process of writing poetry is little more than a spilling over from the chalice of internal angst wherein the drops of the holy liquid of the heart spill forth toward an unsuspecting and often un-accepting audience. The modern poet then exists not as an artist, but rather as a beast of burden whose sweat, blood and tears are manifested as an organization of words that happen on occasion to rhyme.

And for Nietzsche, the artist is, at his very best, “pure primordial pain and its primordial re-echoing. The lyric genius is conscious of a word of images and symbols–growing out of his state of mystical self-abnegation and oneness.”

The high poet sings not of the joys of life, but of the sorrows. He appeals not to the learned man, but to the dying. Whether poeticizing the small deaths of “orgiastic frenzy” or the self-death born from nihilistic self-annihilation, the poet fixates on destruction. The writer of poems can scribble words addressing the happiness of the human condition, but the writer of poetry always focuses in on something far darker and more sinister.

The poet–the writer of poetry–exacts his aims toward litost, that term upon which Kundera fixates in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which essentially means “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” The writer of poems is the writer who runs away from the light of the litost, whose monadic window opens away from his personal misery. The writer of poems, the non-poet who sheepish exterior puts him in bocca al lupo, writes of laughable laughter. The poet writes rather of the war between the laughers–the devil and the angels posturing for the very last of laughs.

“Something marvelous has happened to me. I was transported to the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation, I was granted the favor of making a wish. ‘What do you want,’ asked Mercury. ‘Do you want youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful girl, or any one of the other glorious things we have in the treasure chest? Choose–but only one thing.’ For a moment I was bewildered; then I addressed the gods, saying: My esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing–that I may always have the laughter on my side. Not one of the gods said a word; instead, all of them began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish was granted and decided that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste, for it would indeed have been inappropriate to reply solemnly: It is granted to you.” – Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Aspire to be the writer of poetry, and you will regret it. Aspire to be the writer of poems, and you will also regret it. Aspire to be the writer of poetry or the writer of poems, you will regret it either way. Whether you aspire to be the writer of poetry or the writer of poems, you will regret it either way.

This is living aeterno modo, living “in the mode of eternity.” Eternity is regret. Love or hate, laugh or cry, write or do not write, live or die. You will regret it either way. Litost is the perpetual state of regret.

Another observation by Kundera: all life can be viewed according to an old hebrew proverb, which states that when “Man thinks, God laughs.”

Think or do not think, act or do not act. You will regret it either way. And God will laugh at you all the same. For non-thought is nothing but the thought of nothing. Even the nihil is a subject when it is conceived of by an object.

So what can anyone do right in a world where every action actualizes itself as a variable in the eternal mode of regret?

The answer is simple: one can only do wrong.

But if one does wrong, one still will come to regret it.

Do wrong and you will regret it. Do right and you regret it. Do wrong or do right, you will regret it either way. Whether you do wrong or do right, you will regret it either way.

Of course, Kierkegaard didn’t believe in the problem of the either/or. But so many others functioning in the aesthetic mode of existence fell limp into its trap.

Like Elliott Smith. Who never was able to make the final choice between the aesthetic life and the moral life. Whose culminating artistic statement directly referenced and wrestled with the Kierkegaardian conundrum.

Like Ian Curtis, who willfully accepted aesthetic regret, who couldn’t see the irony in Kierkegaard’s quip about hanging.

Like John Keats, whose “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream” fell by the wayside when he decided his “words were writ in water.”

Lofty aesthetic aspirations are tantamount to death. Humble aesthetic aspirations are tantamount to death.

“Death, death, death comes sweeping down,

filthy death the leering clown,

death on wings, death by surprise,

failing evil from worldly eyes,

death that spawns as life succumbs,

while death and love, two kindred drums,

beat the time till judgment day,

an actor in a passion play,

without beginning, without end,

evermore, amen.” – Francesco Dellamorte

Whether we love or hate, live or die, do wrong or do right, we artists are doomed, are damned to regret.

So how do we go about carrying on?

We measure out our time with coffee spoons, we “poets” waxing poetic over the dead, praying to our personal poetic saints for redemption against regret.

But all we have to show for all of the above is mere regret.

Regret: the dialectic of defeat.

Here it comes, laughing, singing, waiting for the idiots to try in vain like Sisyphus to overcome the either/or of the lives they lead as trivial routines.

Either/or,

aesthetics/ethics,

A/B.

It’s really all the same to me.

When Einstein was 13, he was failing all of his classes and was generally treated as an idiot.

When I was 13, I was killing time acing high school classes when the SATs told me I was smart enough for college.

When I was 13, the twin towers and Jay-Z’s The Blueprint dropped on the same day.

When I was 13, Explosions in the Sky were almost put on the do-not-fly list thanks to their album art and credo for their masterpiece Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever: “this plane will crash tomorrow.”

It did.

When I was 13, Radiohead jumped into a river with nothing to fear and nothing to doubt. They narrated the fall of the modern day Empedocles, and borrowing a couple of lines from Hermann Hesse, became indie rock’s Hölderlin. But their proverbial leap into the throes of death did not drive them to madness. Hölderlin is lost in the modern era to all but the most astute, obtuse and academic of people. Radiohead sold millions of copies of a record called Amnesiac, ostensibly their personal sonic plea to be forgotten.

Of course, this is all a load of ex post facto nonsense.

When I was 13, I didn’t listen to Radiohead, or Jay-Z, or Explosions In The Sky. But I did watch the towers fall on CNN, my face cold and impassive and curious as to the nature of structural disintegration while my father wept into his coffee cup beside me on our ratty sofa.

When I was 13, I listened to pathetically self-indulgent music because I wanted to be different than all of my rich, plastique peers. I earnestly believed in the faux-poetic powers of bands like Thrice and My Chemical Romance; I thought Dustin Kensrue name-dropping Nietzsche at the end of “So Strange I Remember You” (and mispronouncing it, naturally) was the most grandiose and powerful artistic statement I’d ever heard.

I deified a select group of 20- and 30-somethings scribbling out lyrics intended to appeal to the angsty, American teenage demographic. I lived in the mountains and sought meaning in the problems of city kids. I began a 25-piece-long series of poems titled “Industrial Restitution,” in spite of the fact that my family still grew a majority of the vegetables it consumed during the 9-month-long Bozeman winter. I didn’t understand industrialism, and while I wanted more than anything to understand restitution, I’m certain I was terribly off-base.

I remember dreaming about beautiful women from exotic places. I dreamt the most innocent of dirty dreams. No sex, no intimate caresses, no lips locking. Just impassioned sidelong glances and my dreamer’s heart aflutter with the possibilities of knowing love outside familial fidelity.

I lived in a house with no locks on the doors.

And it’s that sort of physical, corporeal overexposure and vulnerability that at once compelled me both to shut myself into the recesses of my mind and attempt to open myself up to the masses of the world, my arms thrown wide and my eyes clenched shut, waiting for a lovely something to drive itself into my chest with the recklessness of a crashing plane.

I was the idiot.

They should have called me Myshkin, not Matthew. Always the runt, always all-too-willing to blindly and unquestioningly forgive the people who wanted most to injure me. My pride upon a pyre, my health suspended in a bottle of liquid codeine, my eyes ever arched toward the astral plane waiting for an Aglaya of my own.

Everything was simpler when my love was innocent and civil. Virginal romanticism is so thrillingly uncomplicated. Remembering the days when thinking and doing were mutually exclusive, I wonder how I manage to get by in my present post-purity position. The consumation of lust means the destruction of love, at least in the angelic and elegiac sense that Dostoevsky describes it.

I am become love, destroyer of worlds. Je suis devenu l’amour, destructeur des mondes.

Somehow, both Jay-Z and Radiohead have become intrinsically tied to my present sexuality. Radiohead represents the side of me that is Myshkin: holy, wholly spiritual, forgiving, forgetting, angelic, incorporeal. Jay-Z, on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, brings out the Rogozhin side of me: volatile, vicious, lustful, lacivious, perverse, fallible. Brit-rock vx. Brooklyn rap. The disparate halves of my loversoul, spinning like adulterers in the Inferno of the modern age. Are we still talking about Dostoevsky? And whatever happened to those Explosions in the Sky?

Ah, so that is industrial restitution. When the only things you have are complexes.