SHELL-SHOCKED
How is one to make a life, to be a life, when there so often seems to be
just
BLANKNESS
SILENCE
BOREDOM
DEATH
INCOMPLETION
CRACKS
FRAGMENTATION
NOISE
INTERRUPTION
TOO MUCH
TOO LITTLE
you might say it requires navigational skills (at the very least) on the
order of sciomancy, a communication with the dark inert matter of the universe,
the dead, shades, the past , with the intent of divining the future; a reading
of bones in etheric bodies, charred remains in teacups, battered shores,
and shattered psyches. In the glare of a 'bad infinity' as Hegel called
it, all i want to do sometimes is cling to the shoreline--which IS the bad
infinite, seeing only the grain of sand in the world, NOT following Blake's
dictum. One way to move is...to follow the cracks, rather than stepping
over them.
Some 4200 years ago (when the Hale-Bopp comet first appeared) Yu, father
of the first emperor of the Xia dynasty, saw rising out of the Lo River
a turtle with certain markings and cracks on its shell and meditated on
their significance.
3100 years ago King Wen formalized these cracks and markings in blackened
and fired tortoise shells as the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching or book of
changes. King Wen (declared king posthumously by his son who became the
first emperor of the Zhou dynasty) created the hexagram arrangements while
imprisoned by the Shang emperor; it was not an arrangement to describe abstract
principles, but to describe his life and how it could be useful in overthrowing
the corrupt Shang emperor and setting up a better government.
Rather than divining the space OF the other, the 64 cracks were arranged
as a navigational tool toward and around the other, infinitely extensible
formalized auratic handholds; a strategy of optimization to force the attention
of the inanimate, the inert, in a return animation of blank mute matter
but now gifted with language, a talking shell, bone, reed...
(Perhaps the crack and the aura or
halo are not unrelated. The aura, keeping in mind Walter Benjamin's concept
of aura as "the unique phenoma of a distance however close that may
be " would thus be evidence of an infinte, abyssal crack in the idea
of 'surface'. This crack, as Gilles Deleuze describes it, "...runs
its course in a continuous, imperceptible, and silent way, [and] that which
it transmitts does not allow itself to be determined, being necessarily
vague and diffuse, transmitting only itself, it does not reproduce that
which it transmits. It does not reproduce the 'same'. It reproduces nothing,
being content to advance in silence and follow the lines of least resistance.
As the perpetual heredity of the other, it always takes an oblique line,
being ready to change directions and to alter its canvas". p 325,
Logic of Sense)
In the 20th century, even the angelic tradition has become cracked whether in the distance and separation of a Rilkean angel or the progressive piling of debris of Benjamin's backward facing angel, pushing it into the future almost against its will: "A metaphysical fracture intervenes in the angeological traditon. Instread of being the guardians of a threshold, here angels appear to be unsurpassable demons of the Limit." Cacciari, Necessary Angel/p. 9)
The 64 cracks, in transmitting only themselves and the contingencies of
the crack, become the forcing medium for the 'future', a bolus traveling
through the gullet of the world's space/time line (remembering that bolus
comes from: 'to throw a mass" and means a large pill in veternary medicine);
just as the 32 chromosome pairs, transmitting through a space/time matrix
(means mother), a coded matter, germ plasm, finding outlet through a thin
scrim of flesh, matter spoken, then speaking, gossamer DNA strands converting-machinery
for matter, bringing into pearlescent relief axiomatic flesh, mute matter
linguified, navigational beacons coding movement loxodromically, cutting
across all meridians, pursuing its own path.
loxodrome-- rhumb line--a sailor who has chosen a direction
on the compass and keeps it steadily is following
a rhumb line.
rhumb line--line on the surface of the earth that makes equal
oblique angles with all meridians, that is, a spiral
coiling round the poles but never reaching them,
and that is a path of a ship sailing always oblique to
meridian in the direction of one and the same point
of the compass.