coldever

Where ideas are likely to be arranged differently: the point of literary criticism is to rearrange the text with a few ideas; reverse that, you have arranged ideas by literary means. A sort of fictive dialogue dealing with extant texts. They're like warm, ungovernable bodies.

A theory-minded critic doesn't truly excavate; it is a commonplace that we write the thing we read. You'd still be lost if you looked past either tradition, philosophy or literature. Try to engage them both with antagonism set between them? What occurs is a rippling fusion of disparate discourses that are usually interconnected.

And so the last few projects have looked...slightly subjective, really trying to convey an artist's arrangement of these textual moments, and in philosophy: a style above all, following Nietzsche most in creating--smashing around in--words. Not a mere call to write forcibly, or to even provide a sense of meaning. Not so small as therapy. Instead an inducement, a law--reeking of candor. Affirmations ripped bodily into text.

createven education

The process has been covertly creative—for every theory presented in grad school I pretended an alliterative, studied performance as if upon a stage. Values-theory and aesthetics have merged into a purpose at once artistic and intellectual; they are conflicted as to which extreme I point. Arendt introduced me to the thought control of totalitarianism, which must be set above fascism for the pure repetitive constraint of the subject’s thought, the crippling logic in one of two ideological stances. In one, nature is embodied by the state and it must be furthered—nurtured—by the master race; in the other, history is finally to fulfill itself by actuating the giant nothing, the end of conflict (the key problem solved by the state). At last I saw Nazis and Stalinists at the level of logical thinking, I considered the reasons why they had to be obeyed…

Political science was a way to study moral philosophy, with MacIntyre owning most of the final scene, Arendt falling in the middle of Locke and Rousseau, debt and ownership to liberty, onward to freedom—until we reached Rawls and veils of ignorance which began to look strangely decorative when they were only meant for setting up hypothetical states.

Thereafter American liberalism took on bleak forms as political boundaries shrank: Rawls sought to eliminate the personal, private, that which is specific to a non-repeatable individual unit. Many—particularly Mouffe—have asked if there is a way out of this state of effacement. Isn’t it merely a quest for invisible liberty, even if expressed precisely in Rawls’ dry tone, this strictly logical attempt to structure a state permanently? For when we remove the veil of ignorance we resume our title, be it low or exemplary; we’re never absolved of personality. We get our wallets back and cannot help knowing where we stand and from that, how others stand. To the best possible effect on their stations, we arrange society to maximize the general good, along well-defined lines, from that neutral place of valence so that while I have as much as possible, so do you, though still less than me. After all, we cannot just dream a theory of total equality and general ownership! Rawlsian liberalism prevents such forgetting: someone always has what the other lacks.

And then there was Foucault, Derrida et al. What was before a case for European universalism fell to the next wave and everything dissolved, especially the underlying thread, the backdrop of superiority in learned and artistic discourse. Suddenly everything was the empty transcendental signified, Europe falling off its high horse: every simple aesthetic pleasure was stripped of innocence. With Eagleton running the show, beauty was a distraction from the political and was therefore always used politically, to distract while Reason was employed far more dangerously to obfuscate crucial economic realities. Naturally, capitalism uses the best of us against us…

All this began to fade, however, when Dolores returned to Alterity.

Law and literature. Legal literature. Law as literature. No, and no. Only law in literature--because reading literature as literature is not averse to law...

Is the gulf of oil to be the next gold rush? Once the gulf itself is sealed and turned into an oil reserve, really only a few letters off from reservoir...

We'll need a large roof. Unless we build a maze of siphons, spin it back into the zone---a void...enter at your risk. The most dangerous place to just light upon, lift the lid, swim: 't will suck you in. The depths, the miles of oily depths, the West's last drop, its full deck of what it's got that it must steal from others once it's gone. The bank of America, enormous. From the moon you'd need a scope to see. "The oil is likely to stretch into the fall. The cap will trap only so much of the oil, and relief wells being drilled won't be completed until August." And it will be an ocean we'll just scoop from, heat our homes with, live in common competition for---the vastness being drained.

Let's hook it up to vending machines at the furthest points, provide tap sources for mules and such. They're just as stubborn as they ought to be. Convenience stores will improve as you push on south. Shit just up and starts looking like gold.

Until at last. Like the fish throwers of Seattle, gas fillers juggle toddlers and are so friendly you'd entrust them with your reputation, they are the swipers of cards and spinners of petrol pumps---"gas" having gone out with the idea that it comes from underground. For we have a sea of it and have erected a see as well. Religious oil economy, dutiful post-oceanic following. (The Mexican government will have to love it as well. Many opportunities for a city made with the well of life flanking and encouraging it---join us!!)

In short, how I could use this, personally in my fictive little realm of Word documents:

Consequences for America's sodden lower extremity in its entirety. Stretching as north as Alterity along a nauseating life-line, a channel, and with it, putrid hope. In this town we make...all sorts of stuff for well-oiled machines; many things made with or by or for Oil, these are the parts required. We sort and grind, pack and send, parts--lots and lots of parts. To the rest of the country.

We function a bit like ants. We are well paid and watch after a major operation, each of us. Our pubs are great for brawls. Our hills inspire poets, isolate intellectuals. Great four-wheeling. Tough tracking, building forts accessible only by fat four-wheelers.

You haven't thought much about the fact of there even being four-wheelers in the world---those tear-uppity crawlers with glutinous nobs around the wheels, gummy chompers set into spinning rubber puffs.

Yes, disgusting in this context.

But don't knock it without having first tried it, obviously...

Eyes just closed on me. Dry.
Anyway in the town of Alterity--never mind.

and it's

You've got to just...tell us what it is about that place, and the tale can be rung up again, another way. We only need evidence. At the gate, as it were. Can you deliver?

It's not settled yet, says Ray. It won't be until we get our quotes back. Does she still have them, says I. Not--as it stands (inside this...hole in the ground)--that's it, I continue: what gets me about this place. Just that, it's a sodden hole in the ground.

Where the defeat waits, is it death?

Quite, that is it. Mirror the others, along the way, driving a tractor possessed. This is the escape, and there is the bottom. Riding along, a track--rather, a cut long and sideways, or at least on our right, a definite side.

Get away. I am riding in this? Possessed--tractor? As you say?

Or aren't we all?

"Dicey, this game you're playing. Isn't it? As I said, the quotes are mine unless specified other-wise. I'm the only one simply begins and ends. Not that I am it. But it's told by me. I've caught a few and I'll go further, certainly. I've got parameters. Said, what--did you? You couldn't have! But not now. You're interruptions, betwixt yourselves...really not good. Take them out."

Fools. No longer anything. Two, now it's a lonely one. Looking. Outstretching. Dicing--and it's the saddest...development in my life, anyway. We're not even sure we have to say a name any longer, each has been established, both--is how we're represented, insupportable would be our separation.

"Nice. Very nice indeed."

named

"We wish that the situation involved you, only it doesn't," I told the editor of the Lookout. He stood as a man standing in the past. "What is that crawling behind you?" I asked. It was some rodent. "Only a humble zombie, let's hope. Or did you bring a guest? In that case let her treat you with silence, and tell the tale of what brings you here. Strange."

"I shall make it hopeful and emphatic, including the price adjustments that will occur later today, but from the perspective of a riotously silent Sunday morn."

"Can you tell me the prices as they stand at the moment?"

"They don't actually matter." But after a moment he was visibly in a state of acceptance. "It's a Marxist text, yet." He paused again, the moon shed its last slice of influence, and Ray decisively began. "In short, flies stuck in the intermission soup and the effect they had on the reviews. 'Need a Head Shave?' ran one in particular, in my own paper. 'You'd like to make sense of her lines--but they're tangled inside this ineffectual Hairdressing Studio. Says one actor, 'We didn't know when to begin the Weird. Before, her work was very clever with cues for awkward behavior, as in they weren't exactly part of the script, or even a part of the plot. Just the arc, the curve--one ought not to say "the mood," because that...comes and goes.' Does this actor know her earlier work like we do? Was he ever cast a special role, one made just for him? Of course not. The only real person to ever appear in her work was you. Genius! And now I find you here! Forget that I'm the one in the garden at 5am. I have a right to be here. I'd never been discovered and all I'd ever seen was my own fate on the perimeters of what I'd thought was her most absorbing hobby--as if gardening had replaced writing! At any rate, the structure, the reviews were saying, was there in the Hairdressing Studio, but--and I quote--'not its translator.' What could that mean? Were you her translator? Why should something written in the common language need translating?"

"I know all about this but thanks, thanks for the new perspective," I said.

He went on, "The wave of activity of misguided actors, quoting the devil who would take their sentences backstage. As for me," he coughed, "I've been living in the fog, waiting. I've been leaving my lights on but not necessarily sleeping. I fear I'm obeying a dozen masters and their friends' voices. 'Find the strength to publish these reviews and do not mention them in you editorial, tell your opinions on other matters. And think not of how she works the stubby green pen made of wood and silver that shades and glares the glossy photos she signs!"

"Alarming!" Dolores said from the window, a balcony I had forgotten overlooked the garden from the far corner of her room. I felt as if I were in a control group, the one not given the questionable substance yet convinced it has been--and this is almost how the obvious concept of a placebo worked its way into my head, after a meandering sentence preparing me for it. I wasn't narrating, I was barely thinking in words, but out came the phrase "romantic individualism," and I was sure I had concluded my role in this suddenly fanatical love triangle. Strange, the editor of the local (intellectual) newspaper committing himself to the illusions his star writer stirred in him...

Dolores repeated my phrase verbatim, as if it were a soliloquy rather than a puncturing quip in the night: as she enunciated each syllable it fell to the grass and sprouted intimations, very colorful in the accumulating sun. But then as if she had said nothing, she pushed her smart little head further out the window and asked what this was all about, as if the silence she was assuming to have been only now interrupted could be mended by a dutiful explanation by one of her suitors. The falseness of this attitude struck Ray instantly; he seemed about to fall into the pit he was about to claim was the source of evil in Dolores's garden. He began to recite this foolish bit, only to be told by the playwright herself why his peculiar role in the writing process was certainly not to be neglected but never to be overstated. "We have an editor in the garden" she ended, "a decision maker. Now, to excise is...not all that this fellow does, just most of it. But he won't revive his paper by trying on new hats in front of old friends."

This baffled both of us. The disgruntled magic of the moment seemed obliterated; but as dolorous loyalists, we insidiously justified this witticism, making our own meaning, leading ourselves into it all over again.

For me, this exercise in hidden logic told of a courage in Dolores' distant urges, to write a play about a matriculating housewife because she'd realized that at one point, she'd wanted to become one, and was now resting her chin on the window sill like a pie that needed cooling. "Ray, please return later, then go away."

Nothing obstructed his retreat, but he was caught. Talking was his salvation, as if regardless of what he would say we would still appreciate the effort; furthermore, we'd feel obligated to respond. And so he went on with it. "Tonight I have called the site, the active burning opening, the source of all poetry, to finally discover what it's got--the last thing I'd expected was considerate behavior on the part of those intruded upon! For I am, at bottom, a caricature. I came here to make myself less substantial, to excite the enterprise of managing a paper and, it turns out, to contribute to a smoldering love affair between writers. Myself, however, I am--as you say, Dolores--excised."

I wondered whether Ray had had to sit very long for these hypothetical caricatures or if he had visited a carnival artist even less dedicated than Dolores. He had no idea what he was about; she was complacent on the matter; I was faithfully disinterested, so much so that I was the only actor willing to put a name to the travesty, the rhetorical monstrosity, of his presentation. Yet my intention was to wait until the scene had ended.

Ray took out a thought from his pocket to help him insist she was her own actor from the play. "Did they sell you to an auto shop to be lent to strangers who generally went for mudding, leaving trails over the hills? What did the parents think? You were too deliberate for a machine that responded well to children."

Uncomfortable, I interrupt. "What...in what direction lies the office of Dr. Benway?"

"A phenomenal artist," answers Ray. "All hands off, man. No one's left to say what anything's good for."

Dolores shifted ground. "Start talking like me--you're nothing to reach around with. I'm just fine with my own voice imitating me."

"That's why, incidentally," I say, "there's so much shown on the dolorous show, going back mostly to a bottomless pit."

Ray: "I've come, I think, to fill it in."

pics of exags

She was attaching false greenery to each post on the back deck--which of course she called a porch. The only roof was the tree she had to trim just a bit to let the flames not touch its branches; the side of the porch that was most frequently comfortable to her after this operation was the one least lit by the flames.

"We wished that the situation involved you, only it doesn't." He stood--as if standing in the past. "What is that crawling behind you? Only a long-haired zombie, let's hope. Oh. You brought a guest. In that case let her treat you with silence, and tell the tale. Make it hopeful and emphatic--the outlook of price adjustments on a Sunday morn. Can you tell me the price?"

He accepted. "It's a Marxist text." He paused. The moon had moved when he began: "Flies stuck in soup during intermission, the effect they had on the review. 'Heads are shaved at dolorous show' ran the title. 'You'd like to make sense of their line--it's caught up perhaps at the sight of the hairdressing studio--we didn't know when to begin the Weird.' The structure, they were saying, was there, but not its translator. The wave of activity would continue alone, misguided, 'the devil may take it back to storage, the last sentence, I'm going into the fog. Leave the light on. Obey a dozen masters, find it in yourself not to use a broken pen.' But Dolores works it fine, a stubby green pen made of wood at the base and shiny silver against the page."

"Alarming," she said from the window, a balcony I'd forgotten looks to this day from the far corner of her room onto our leafy control lab. Where no group is given the test, though they each constitute the entire study--"Rampant individualism?" she stood her head up to say. It looked about to fall into the imaginary pit. Since Ray had mentioned just a moment ago (or was about to mention) the likely locality of the void, adding that he'd not slept since he heard the voice saying it was possibly here--since that information was fresh in my mind, Ray was now being told by playwright herself. "We have editors, decision makers. to excise is...not all that they do. Just nearly. You won't get that by trying on new hats in front of old friends."

This shocking exercise in hidden logic told of a courage in Dolores' distant urges, portraying matriculating housewives because she'd realized that at one point she'd wanted to become one. "It comes slowly and is reinforced, towards the forgiveness of the present century; are we taken out of it, then? Never! Ray, return, go away."

Nothing stood in his way, but he was caught. One could tell he didn't like gardens but was standing in one he couldn't let himself escape though he just was ordered out. Talking was the answer, no matter what he'd say we would recognize the effort, and be responsible to ourselves respond. He went on with it. "Call the site, the active burning opening, the source of all poetry. See what it's got, possibly all manner of thoughtful (considerate) behavior, a man with talent's caricature's running half the business of self-imagining."

Did this man, we might ask, make or sit for these pictures of exaggeration? When is the next logical leap for this poor unreflective boot in the door so that the terror in his eyes will be cleared up (in our understanding of it)? He approached an answer to all this. "Oakland coastal base, one number off so, further down the road you'll see a wreckage on wheels, upright, enjoying loyalty across the lake, smiling."

"I know, Ray," says Dolor. "You've got all kinds of stories left and right about how this shit of me got stuck. It's Flavor-Aid, remember. And laced? Not at all. Just cold. Exceedingly cold on the hottest of days. Thus the wreckage! This is the story you want to explain my character--as a news event, yes that is fine. Alterity has less to show for its theories of being than your paper could ever pretend to acknowledge!"

damn tired

What a monologue praying used to be, a beseeching self-castigation, throwing promises into the dark! That was the beginning, one likes to admit, of writing. Yet it was stopped before any descriptions of the apocalypse could be made in my own style.

"'Control yourself,' she intoned." Hasn't that been the injunction when you are too aware of what you're about? Such a controlled stance is indeed awkward! Finally, you must learn that you need your books. Contemplate selling them in the front yard, a dollar each, the fabled renouncement that should be just as redemptive of learning as imagining one's death ends up redeeming life. Imagine the suffering after the loss of your books/life!

At least now I've a different role to play--forget that it's not any better. Focus on its difference from the previous one. No need to be specific: the focusing is to be conducted in private.

Shouldn't I find a place between symbolic and realistic? I see you standing there, ready to tell me the boundary is never fixed. I say, your platitudinous post-: what exactly does it follow?

You could learn to write with chalk. You could ask the audience, are my eyes closing because I'm tired or because I've a headache? To which they would be obliged to respond somehow, it being a "random" question: make the impression of randomness. Seek out the drollery in every moment, the flat humor that once gave others the impression that you possessed an intellect. This could help launch a career!

No exclamations, please.

Anyway, I thought you had a new style for me to watch develop. It's finally late enough to go to sleep since you've discovered you are not a writer yet. Been playing games, eh?

Yes well, my alter-ego gave this [death-scene snow globe] to me, 27th birthday. Said, grad school's over the moment you know you're going dry.