"Nothing is Funnier Than Unhappiness..."

living one's dying, remembering one's death

r.cheat/m

"And having heard or probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line."

Samuel Beckett

A constant mumbling, hope against hope, faith against faith, now pressed against past, leveraged against no-future (that neckless geek) which falters in the face of ALL futures: interminable blankness leveraged against terror on the one (dead) hand and horror on the other (paralytic) hand: lumpen waxes composing the face (cartesian certainty of identity or historical inevitability of massified melting--solid into air?), sooty carbon exhaust(ing) fighting with fingers attempting to gouge the eyes out (or is that gauge?) interminable 'testing', gauging, gouging: trying to mould the face even as it breaks it: phosphoresent blooming 'underneath' some sepia-toned patina of decay, looming out of the shutter, some detritus cast on celluloid, bound in its own dreary archive: you'll let me pull it back from its wrapping won't you? back, back, back: here, here, here -- no rest but no target either: I was surely THERE! I'm barely HERE...but I was surely THERE wasn't I? I can prove it: I have this photo: I have Proof! now where was I...I was THERE, I'm HERE, I'll be THERE, which is no more but will BE...won't it? (remembering the future) You'll give me assurance of that, of that I'm sure because I'm HERE and NOW. Aren't I. and you believe me (don't you?) you can test it and gauge it yourself...(wait a minute...what 'it'? The photo...yes, you see it don't you? You have Proof, you've gouged it, er, gauged it...it's there before you...TEST it if you want....(only a small bit of panic sets in...HERE...or was it THERE ...or will it be panic THERE) you can test it though. you can prove it. You've let me down already. I can tell from the way you're reading it. I WANT you to prove it: I've given it to you: but here's some help for you (even though you don't seem to want to help ME): I remember: I remember the death bed, in goose down, flattened from sour sweat, sweet ashen face, "you'll always be my little darling. It's better this way it's better THERE." (and you remember that OTHER thing...I will remember it for you...but I won't mention. I will help you, why won't you help?) Now you remember too. Now it's been proven. Hasn't it? I remembered it now...you remember. It's really not that difficult if you avoid the panic you can remember, can't you? It's not difficult if you don't panic. If you can remember it if you can remain solid. But then you, no, I, panic, become vaporous and I can't remember whether I remember too much or I don't remember enough (is the only choice Freud or Socrates??!!) My memories seem coterminous with the photos, books and books of photos (Are we always only living 'after the leaves have fallen'?). Was that all of it? at some point that will be all of it my memories will be those photos maybe already are. Are they proof? help me... It's not difficult if you don't panic. If you can remember it. or maybe if you can forget it. I can't remember. But then you panic, then you remember it and you CAN'T forget it, then it's THERE and HERE and THERE, shutting off the air, all times collapse into some sepia heap (desperately, desperately you want to dissolve in that sepia heap, then you want to burn it, then you want to become solid, then you dissolve, then...) but YOU can prove (can prove ME) I'm not stopping you I want you to do so. In fact I have the proof right here if you'll only look at it and SEE it. It's proof ...isn't it? You see it. I'm not making it up (I'm not making ME up) it's faded but it's there I didn't make it up: you see it you test it you KNOW it's true therefore I'm not understanding why you don't believe me. No you weren't THERE but you're HERE now, now, so that counts for something doesn't it? there is some proof there, isn't there? in you being here now. It really doesn't take much if you don't panic (take a deep breath) but you MIGHT have to panic to get the proof you'll need you'll see (then) because you'll be all places at once and the proof will open to you and in that vertiginous tumble fateful time (THERE<HERE<THERE) will open, an abyssal torrent, luminescence formed from the friction of times passing each other, beyond some sort of mechanical shutterized exuberance (only opens when pressed, gouged, gauged, forms only redeemable when pressed, like thumbs to closed eyelids, PROOF of the structure underneath: a moment of panic though---press too hard, light becomes fire: out come the eyes! and I fear you're pressing too hard: don't panic...."just tough it out"...) It's simple really: there is the picture for you to remember. Now you remember don't you? (You're not THAT different from me is it too much of a stretch for you asking too much for you to remember me to help me remember me to remember my remembering best of all to remember my memory? is that asking too much?) It's right there in front of you, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 52 weeks, 365 days and you know sleep won't help won't dissolve me/you make me/you solid it all becomes one continuous sheet of fire memory to forgetting to thinking to remembering to loss all burned in continuous freefall flames in space away from gravity burning in all directions all times simultaneously ...

"Laughter is the sound of language trying to commit suicide but being unable to.."

Simon Critchley

 Like a knot....Pulled Through DNA

Fehta Murghana

"and I'm gone...

through a crack in the past,

like a dead man walking."

David Bowie

"What fascinates in the carnal is the sense that in the most palpable organ the most elusive power lurks, in the solidity of substances the most annihilating menace has taken cover. Subjectivity haunts space; it is nowhere localizable, and most evident in the distances. Positing the other in the here-and-now of a palable body makes his subjectivity most absent there, everywhere absent."

Alfonso Lingis, Libido: the french existential theories

Flash of resonance up the thin cord, through millenia, finding stiffness, wetness, all the same in the end: a liquifaction proceeding from rigidity. Stoked by fires of flesh, fires in flesh, it prunes itself (surculation) even as it moves (an uncanny circulation, but always too late with its payments) in ways and realms totally foreign to time or: time left in space becomes its only visible means of support: thin rods spiraling, gyrating thru families of species of flesh, decaying then picking up steam again, rising from the dust, from anthills to molehills to the himilayas. Time attempts to trace the path(s), notches in space's frame, tries to be 'historical', tries to be a geneology, tries just to be, sein in zeit. To no avail. It wants OUT. It wants to be placed in charge, it wants to have its cake (space) and eat it too (time). But it's just a freeze-frame, flash frozen, left high and dry, not hard and wet, not even the peaks of the himilayas left, ground down to sea-level: the ultimate fate of every erection, to end in liquifaction. Then just to end, petered IN, not out. Thus the trauma (but who's?) keeps moving thru the molecules, sapiency or not, always inadequate to its vehicle. The inadequacy's the trauma, moving quicksilver-like at the merest touch to the nearest touchdown: thinking not only not allowed, but not appropriate, left mainly to construct its widgets and gadgets, only to see them sink beneath the waves of sulfurous desires (Saturn's fevered dreams, ratcheting thru its OWN esoteric mechanism).

Finally: shreiks of recognition (really, méconnaisance) as the buffeting ceases: 'memories' strike a chord (but THIS time, SPACE masquerading as time, a charity ball for all fundamental particles of dread, isolation, angst, etc--silved etchings carved in some forlorn uprising of flesh from its hiding place, extruded from the most unlikely of scenarios, marriage of hard and wet. But yes, in some communication (perhaps even surculation) with those millennial strands (always lying in wait): adenine, thyamine, cytosine, guanine. But certainly not expecting the festering which the Machine fosterparent's (Great Exfoliator down PAST the hard and wet: of no concern really, after all, the inform-ation is the thing. Miscegenation of copper and carbon, hoping to straighten out the mess under the aegis of the diagram, flatten out the bumps, blow the carbon out the tailpipe.) Some fundamental law of gravity negated as the spark jumps the gap--but the gap keeps getting wider. "Put the brakes on," grandma yells, "he's a monster!" And pretty soon there's nothing left BUT gaps, no place for the spark to land, no place to de-monstrate, to show forth those good deeds you're always going on about (and deed to WHICH memory palace.) Where's the memory in a gap? But still Space trudges on, now fretting, now strutting in its TimeMask, adorable freak that it's become. It's got the rollcall for us timebound strands (linked up to upperstory processing systems, conveniently landlocked. or bonelocked) as it ticks off all systems, one by one, then pounds them into smithereens. Hey! 'Nobody needs yer stinkin' time here', it tells the latecomers. Unfortunately, we're all latecomers at this floorshow, no matter when we get here, and no matter which door we come in. "It's just the way it's always been," moans Aunt Sally as Jessica picks up the slack and George glues on another Time Mask (tm) to his new 'droid and and Sam porks his 12 year old daughter Looking over his shoulder he yells "not for much longer! Just you wait and see!." Hard to tell though since time just ran out...............

"...generation is the consolation of the ego, its prolongation, the passage from one body to another across which the unconscious only reproduces itself in itself."

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-oedipus

On the verge of comprehensibility, the body loses itself to us, with all its dark terrain. (One could just as likely say: on the verge of knowing itself, the body is lost to itself). Problematic wording for annulated creatures: as if there were only one body, as if endless continuous strands of DNA, reaching through tubes into caverns---unimaginable spans of time, yet, necessarily (otherwise we wouldn't be here) uninterrupted from the first flesh borne from the ash of the first star.

But now we believe in interruption. Recovering the past. Re-covering: putting a new roof on, a new shelter for what can only be the present, always only now nop matter where or how far we step; over what can only be an imagined detritus, operating always under an illusion, the thought that we can re-map that dark terrain where body and memory collapse under the weight of our spectral imaginings.

And so we imagine (and there is 'truth' in that, at least as much as in anything else: but it's the falling off of philosophy and science into poetics, this Imaginal) so we image these dark, uncertain 'truths', which are true only insofar as they are 'fictional.'